NOTES  ON  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NKW  YORK  •    BOSTON  •    CHICAGO  •    DALLAS 
ATLANTA   •    SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  LIMITED 

LONDON   •    BOMBAY  •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  LTD. 

TORONTO 


NOTES  ON 
POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

A  UNIVERSITY  ADDRESS 


BY 

VISCOUNT  MORLEY,   O.M. 

CHANCELLOR   OF   THE   UNIVERSITY 
OF   MANCHESTER 


Nefo  gorft 

THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 
1914 

Att  rights  reterved 


COPTBISHT,    1914, 

BY  THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY. 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.    Published  January,  1914. 


J.  8.  Gushing  Co.  —  Berwick  &  Smith  Co. 
Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  bF  CALIFORNl 
SAiNTA  BARBARA 


NOTE 

THESE  pages  are  a  version,  amplified  and 
recast,  of  an  Address  delivered  by  the  writer, 
as  Chancellor  of  the  University  of  Manchester, 
in  the  summer  of  1912.  The  strict  rules  that 
limit  the  contents  of  a  Bill  in  parliament  by 
its  Title,  would  be  fatal  to  an  academic  ad- 
dress like  this.  I  only  hope  that  my  Notes 
are  not  too  dispersive  to  prevent  some  points 
of  thought  from  being  of  use  in  the  way  of 
suggestion,  interrogatory,  and  perhaps  as  spur 

to  curiosity. 

M. 


NOTES  ON  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 


WHEN   I   had   the   pleasure   of   coming  universities 

«  .  -,  -r       rv          i    and  political 

among  you  a  tew  months  ago,  1  ottered  habitof 
some  remarks  upon  the  obvious  truth  mind- 
that  democracy  in  the  discussions  of  the 
day  means  government  working  directly 
through  public  opinion ;  and  upon  the 
equally  urgent  importance  of  a  body, 
like  this  University,  making  it  one  part 
of  its  office  to  help  in  forming  those 
habits  of  mind  and  temper  upon  which, 
along  with  knowledge  of  the  right  facts, 
the  soundness  of  opinion  depends. 

To-night  I  propose  to  harp  upon  the 
same  string,  and  to  say  something  about 


2  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

politics  and  history.  I  intend  a  double 
subject  with  a  single  object.  I  need 
your  indulgence,  for  of  history  I  know 
too  little,  and  of  politics  some  of  you  may 
think  I  know  too  much,  and  know  it 
wrong.  Pretty  manifest  roots  of  mis- 
chief easily  spoil  both  contemporary 
politician  and  historian ;  both  the  minis- 
ter or  the  elector  of  to-day,  and  the 
interpreter  of  days  long  ago.  Looseness 
of  mind  is  one;  narrowness  of  vision  is 
another.  Plenty  of  infirmities  besides 
are  left.  You  know  the  worst  of  them, 
at  least  by  distant  report  —  indolence, 
impatience,  procrastination,  incoherence, 
pugnacity.  I  include  pugnacity  among 
defects,  for  it  is  no  vice  of  intellect  if  our 
first  attitude  towards  new  opinion  is  one 
of  readiness  and  attentive  response,  rather 
than  instantaneous  combat;  to  give  a 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  3 

hearing,  before  rushing  to  controversial 
fire-arms.  A  receptive  mind  is  after 
all  no  hindrance  to  firm  love  of  truth. 
On  the  other  hand  life  is  short,  and  there 
are  limits  to  patience  with  quackish 
fungoids.  You  have  not,  I  would  fain 
believe,  forgotten  the  spirit  of  a  passage 
from  Spinoza  that  I  quoted  here  last 
time:  "When  I  applied  my  mind  to 
politics,  so  that  I  might  examine  what 
belongs  to  politics,  with  the  same  pre- 
cision of  mind  as  we  use  for  mathematics, 
I  have  taken  my  best  pains  not  to  laugh 
at  the  actions  of  mankind,  not  to  groan 
over  them,  not  to  be  angry  with  them, 
but  to  understand  them."  By  under- 
standing them,  he  says,  he  means  looking 
at  all  the  motives  of  human  feeling,  — 
love,  hatred,  envy,  ambition,  pity,  — 
not  as  vices  of  human  nature,  but  as 


4  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

properties  belonging  to  it,  just  as  heat, 
cold,  storm,  thunder  belong  to  air  and 
sky. 

signs  of  the  So  much  to  begin  with  —  the  mood 
and  temper :  then  the  application  and 
occasion.  Any  reflective  observer,  if  he 
likes,  can  sketch  some  of  the  signs  of  the 
times  in  rather  formidable  outline.  Let 
us  look  at  it.  Political  power  is  de- 
scribed as  lying  in  the  hands  of  a  vast  and 
mobile  electorate,  with  scanty  regard  for 
tradition  or  history.  What  is  history  to 
me  ?  asks  the  plain  busy  man.  Democ- 
racy, they  warn  us,  is  going  to  insist  on 
writing  its  own  programme.  The  struc- 
ture of  executive  organs  and  machinery 
is  undergoing  half-hidden  but  profound 
alterations.  The  two  Houses  of  our  Par- 
liament are  being  fundamentally  trans- 
formed before  our  eyes.  The  Cabinet, 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  5 

keystone  of  the  arch,  in  size  and  in  pre- 
rogative is  not  altogether  safe  against 
invasion.  The  great  wholesome  system 
of  party  is  said  to  be  melting  into  groups 
and  coalitions.  The  growth  of  special 
interests,  each  claiming  for  itself  a  repre- 
sentative Minister  in  the  Cabinet,  has 
turned  it  into  a  noun  of  multitude  indeed, 
and  a  noun  not  wholly  favourable  to  that 
concentrated  deliberation  which  was  pos- 
sible when  Pitt  had  first  six,  then  seven 
colleagues,  Peel  twelve,  and  Gladstone 
fourteen.  To-day  we  are  a  score. 

A  body  of  professional  experts  is  now  committee 
united  to  a  selected  body  of  ministers, 
to  shape  conclusions  in  the  sphere  of 
military  defence,  and  therefore  of  expen- 
diture; and  such  conclusions,  though 
nominally  advisory  or  for  information 
only,  naturally  carry  a  weight  that  can- 


6  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

not  but  affect  the  judgment  and  respon- 
sibility of  a  Cabinet.  The  appearance, 
moreover,  of  a  leader  of  Opposition  in  this 
important  committee  seems  to  point  to 
the  neutralization  both  of  military  and 
foreign  affairs  (for  each  of  these  must 
necessarily  depend  upon  the  other),  and 
to  their  withdrawal  from  the  field  of  party 
contention.  This  would  not  be  the  first 
instance  in  our  history  of  a  vast  slow  silent 
disguised  transformation  in  the  constitu- 
tion of  the  empire,  without  either  embodi- 
ment in  any  single  instrument,  or  any 
coherent  and  systematic  transaction. 
Everybody  knows,  though  nobody  has 
ever  exactly  comprehended,  the  famous 
plan  of  Sir  William  Temple  in  the  time 
of  Charles  II.  Ingenious  observers  may 
trace,  if  they  like,  a  sort  of  return  to 
Temple's  scheme  in  what  they  take  to 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  7 

be  the  slow  re-modelling  of  our  cabinet 
system,  turning  it  into  a  sort  of  supreme 
imperial  senate,  but  always  owing  its 
existence  to  a  majority  of  the  House  of 
Commons  —  a  vital  condition  entirely 
alien  to  Temple's  age  and  mind.  An- 
other important  element  cannot  be  left 
out  of  even  the  barest  summary.  Self- 
governing  commonwealths  over  the  seas 
are  making  initial  claims  for  a  direct 
voice  in  the  control  of  imperial  affairs. 
The  most  recent  move  in  this  direction  — 
the  adjustment  of  naval  contribution  — 
has  not  so  far  been  decisive. 

More     than     all     this     alteration     in  National 

i  .  .  p     i  ,  •,    atmosphere 

machinery,  are  signs  or  change  in  national  ^  charac. 
atmosphere.     These,  we  have  good  rea-  ter< 
son    to   hope,    may   be   only   superficial 
and  transient,  for  nothing  is  more  certain 
than   that  in  a  survey  of  the  modern 


8  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

world,  national  character  is  slowest  of 
all  things  to  alter  in  its  roots.  Mean- 
while, we  discover  a  shaken  attitude 
towards  law  as  law ;  a  decline  in  rever- 
ence for  institutions  as  institutions ;  a 
latter-day  antinomianism.  Even  power- 
ful lawyers  use  language  that  treats  a 
statute  as  a  cobweb;  and  sealed  agree- 
ments by  great  industrial  organizations, 
are  sometimes  no  better  than  ropes  of 
sand.  Nor  is  the  change  peculiar  to 
England.  American  citizens  of  a  reflec- 
tive turn  sometimes  tell  us  of  the  same 
thing  even  there.  If  we  remember,  for 
instance,  that  administration  of  law  is 
the  keystone  of  all  civilized  government, 
it  is  startling  to  hear  American  statesmen 
who  have  held  posts  of  supreme  respon- 
sibility, passionately  denouncing  the 
administration  of  criminal  law  as  a 


POLITICS  AND   HISTORY  9 

disgrace  to  their  country,  and  declaring 
the  English  system  of  judges  appointed 
for  life  to  be  better  than  their  system  of 
elected  judges.  Or  else  on  the  other 
hand  they  demand  appeal  to  a  popular 
referendum  against  decisions  of  State 
Courts  on  constitutional  issues,  and  are 
for  cashiering  the  judges  who  made  them 
—  in  either  case  shattering  the  founda- 
tions of  the  judicial  fabric.  Weakened 
confidence  in  our  parliament  would  be 
formidable,  but  confidence  destroyed  in 
courts  of  justice  would  be  taking  out 
the  linch-pin.  Yet  it  would  not  be  at  all 
true  to  say  that  sense  of  political  curiosity, 
interest,  and  obligation  has  declined. 
The  case  is  just  the  opposite.  Political 
obligation  as  tested  by  the  numbers  who 
take  part  at  elections  is  in  fact  stronger 
rather  than  weaker,  and  sense  of  social 


10  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

duty,  which  is  not  by  any  means  the  same 
thing  as  political  obligation,  has  vastly 
grown  alike  in  strength  and  range. 

May  I,  without  peril,  here  add  another 
engrossing  element  in  the  political  land- 
scape ?  You  have  all  heard  how,  just 
before  the  revolutionary  storm  broke 
over  France  in  1789,  Sieves  published  one 
of  the  most  effective  pamphlets  ever  writ- 
ten :  its  title  was  this  :  "  What  is  the  Third 
Estate  ?  Everything.  What  has  it  been  in 
politics  until  now?  Nothing.  What  does 
it  ask?  To  become  something."  A  good 
critic  of  to-day  warns  us  that  behind  the 
third  estate,  behind  the  fourth  estate,  a 
fifth  estate  has  risen,  with  which  we  have 
to  count.  "Women  who  were  nothing, 
and  who  rather  claim  to  be  everything, 
to-morrow  are  going  to  be  something."  l 

1  Faguet,  Prob.  Pol.  xvi. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  11 

People  capable  of  serious  rumination  Some 

•11  i  i-i  •         causes  of 

will  ask  themselves  what  is  the  precise  social 
connection,  if  any  connection  at  all, 
between  the  embarrassing  changes  of  the 
hour,  and,  say,  five  profound  changes  in 
our  scheme  of  national  life  and  thought 
within  the  last  fifty  years  ?  Such  changes 
are  these.  Predominant  political  power 
has  been  transferred  from  a  landed  and 
hereditary  aristocracy  and  the  middle 
class  to  the  nation  as  a  whole.  A  system 
of  compulsory  education  has  been  spread 
over  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  land. 
Old  ecclesiastical  pretensions  have 
vanished,  and  a  singular  elasticity  is 
working  its  way  into  the  forms,  symbols, 
and  standards  of  theological  creed. 
Science  and  the  scientific  spirit  have,  for 
the  time  at  least,  mounted  into  the 
thrones  of  literature  and  art.  Finally, 


12  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

the  whole  conception  of  the  State  has 
been  enormously  extended.  The  exer- 
tion of  all  the  powers  and  duties  of  a 
State  is  every  day  more  and  more  insist- 
ently demanded.  One  result  of  this  last 
advance  concerns  that  change  in  the 
cabinet  system  to  which  I  have  already 
referred,  for  it  means  extension  of  depart- 
mental labour  for  the  minister,  and  this 
makes  the  task  of  miscellaneous  delibera- 
tion all  the  more  arduous  or  impossible. 
close  obser-  Nothing  is  easier  than  to  make  a  crisis 
out  of  this  signal  conjuncture  of  interest- 


ofreflec-      jjjg^    perplexing,    and    exciting    circum- 

tion. 

stance.  Still  the  long  experience  of  our 
national  history  shows  it  safest,  wisest, 
soundest,  in  respect  of  all  English-speak- 
ing communities,  to  be  in  no  hurry  to 
believe  that,  in  John  Bunyan's  pithy 
phrase,  "passion  will  have  all  things  now." 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  13 

Let  us  pray  to  be  delivered  from  exaggera- 
tion, and  to  have  vouchsafed  to  us  that 
cautious  sense  of  proportion,  which  is  one 
of  the  main  differences  between  a  wise 
man  and  a  foolish.  Above  all,  how  well 
it  would  be  for  everybody,  if  you  who 
have  a  share  in  the  moulding  of  the  future 
in  your  hands,  would  write  on  the  tablets 
of  your  minds  the  words  of  a  man  who 
first  brought  scientific  method  effectively 
to  bear  on  social  problems.  The  present 
writer,  said  Malthus  of  himself,  is  in  no 
temper  to  find  plans  for  the  future  im- 
provement of  society  visionary.  "But 
he  has  not  acquired  that  command  over 
his  understanding  which  would  enable 
him  to  believe  what  he  wishes,  without 
evidence,  or  to  refuse  his  assent  to  what 
might  be  unpleasing,  when  accompanied 
with  evidence."  This  is  the  temper  that 


14  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

we  may  expect  to  see  grow  up  and  spread 
in  universities. 

value  of  Our  present  case,  as  to  social  cause  and 

ethoTSlty  effect,  offers  tempting  material  for  high 
party  dispute,  and  sectarian  recrimination 
and  reproach,  but  nothing  is  to  be  gained 
on  that  line  here  to-night.  An  important 
observer  of  our  own  day  looks  for  progress 
to  a  social  force,  new  in  magnitude  if  not 
in  kind,  described  by  him  as  the  modern 
alliance  between  pure  science  and  indus- 
try.1 How  far  this  new  force  will  go  may 
be  dubious,  but  whatever  strength  it  has, 
must  be  centred  in  these  great  teaching  cor- 
porations. They  must  be  its  main  organs. 
It  is  their  ethos,  their  inner  genius,  that 
must,  apart  from  the  instruction  they 
provide,  lead  and  sustain  us  in  the  march. 

1  Decadence.    Sidgwick    Memorial    Lecture.    By    A.    J. 
Balfour.     1908. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  15 

Universities  have  been  boldly  ranked 
by  competent  historians  with  trial  by  jury 
and  parliaments,  among  leading  institu- 
tions of  the  Middle  Ages.  At  any  rate 
in  England  the  power  of  universities  and 
the  public  schools  that  feed  them,  has 
been  immeasurable  in  the  working  of 
other  institutions.  They  have  been  main 
agents  in  moulding  both  our  secular  and 
ecclesiastical  politics.  They  have  worked 
too  often  for  darkness  as  well  as  light. 
Too  often  and  too  long  have  they  been  the 
mirror  of  stolid  prejudices  and  childish 
conventions ;  the  appendages  of  old  social 
form  and  institution,  rather  than  great 
luminaries  dispensing  knowledge,  and 
kindling  that  ardent  love  of  new  truth  for 
which  youth  is  the  irrevocable  season. 
Power  of  this  high  dimension  is  not  likely 
to  be  missing  in  our  new  universities, 


16  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

though  its  forms  are  undergoing  rapid 
revolution.  Well  was  it  said,  "C'est 
toujours  le  beau  monde  qui  gouverne  le 
monde"  That  is  still  a  great  deal  more 
true  than  people  think,  even  in  countries 
like  our  own  where  aristocratic  polity 
has  in  large  degree  gone  down.  But  the 
privileges  of  the  fine  world  of  social  class 
must  yield  henceforth  to  the  forces  that 
shape  temper,  judgment,  and  range  of 
public  interest,  in  educational  centres 
such  as  yours. 

The  infusion  of  their  thought  and 
temper  is  what  will  impart  its  colour  to 
the  general  discussion.  It  will  reduce 
the  number  of  those  who  think  they  have 
opinions,  when  in  truth  they  have  not. 
Universities,  besides  imparting  special 
knowledge,  are  meant  for  reason's  refuge 
and  its  fortress.  The  standing  enemies 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  17 

of  reason,  in  spite  of  new  weapons,  altered 
symbols,  changing  masks,  are  what  they 
have  always  been  everywhere.  I  will 
spare  you  the  catalogue  of  man's  infirmi- 
ties, of  which  I  said  enough  when  I  began. 
It  is  both  pleasanter  and  sounder  to  turn 
our  eyes  the  other  way,  to  man's  strength, 
and  not  his  weakness  —  towards  equity, 
candour,  diligence,  application,  charity, 
disinterestedness  for  public  ends,  courage 
without  presumption,  and  all  the  other 
rare  things  that  are  inscribed  in  epitaphs 
on  men  of  whom  kind  friends  thought 
well.  Wide  and  stirring  is  the  field. 

There  is  no  unkindness,  and  there  is 
useful  truth,  especially  under  popular 
governments,  in  pressing  people  to  realize 
the  whole  bearings  of  the  commonplace, 
that  time  and  mutations  of  political 
atmosphere  are  incessantly  attaching  a 


18  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

different  significance  to  the  same  ideas 
and  the  same  words.  We  are  so  apt  to 
go  on  with  our  manful  battles  as  if  the 
flags  and  banners  and  vehement  catch- 
words all  stood  for  old  causes.  This  is 
only  one  side  of  all  the  changing  aspects 
of  the  time.  I  ventured  to  speak  of 
narrowness  of  vision.  The  vision  would 
indeed  be  narrow,  that  overlooked  the 
reaction  on  our  own  affairs  of  circum- 
stances outside — the  new  map  of  Europe, 
the  shifting  balances  of  fighting  strength, 
Hague  tribunals,  tariffs,  the  Panama 
Canal,  strange  currents  racing  in  full 
blast  through  the  rolling  worlds  of  white 
men,  black  men,  brown  men,  yellow  men. 


II 

ideals  and         The  most  dogmatic  agree  that  truth  is 
prodigiously    hard    to    find.     Yet    what 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  19 

rouses  intenser  anger  than  balanced 
opinion  ?  It  would  be  the  ruin  of  the 
morning  paper.  It  takes  fire  out  of  con- 
versation. It  may  destroy  the  chance  of 
a  seat  in  the  Cabinet,  and,  if  you  are  not 
adroit,  may  weary  constituents.  The 
reason  is  simple.  For  action,  for  getting 
things  done,  the  balanced  opinion  is  of 
little  avail  or  no  avail  at  all.  "He  that 
leaveth  nothing  to  chance,"  said  the 
shrewd  Halifax,  "will  do  few  things  ill, 
but  he  will  do  very  few  things."  As  King 
Solomon  put  it,  "He  that  considereth  the 
wind  shall  not  sow,  and  he  that  looketh 
to  the  clouds  shall  not  reap."  Modera- 
tion is  sometimes  only  a  fine  name  for 
indecision.  The  partisan  temperament  is 
no  gift  in  a  judge,  and  it  is  well  for  every- 
body to  see  that  most  questions  have 
two  sides,  though  it  is  a  pity  in  a  practical 


20  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

world  never  to  be  sure  which  side  is  right, 
and  to  remain  as  "a  cake  that  is  not 
turned."  You  even  need  the  men  of 
heroic  stamp  with  whom  "a  hundred 
thousand  facts  do  not  prevail  against  one 
idea."  Nations  are  lucky  when  the 
victorious  idea  happens  to  have  at  its 
back  three  or  four  facts  that  weigh 
more  than  the  hundred  thousand  put 
together.  Some  well-trained  observers 
find  history  abounding  in  volcanic  out- 
breaks of  fire  and  flame,  seeming  only 
to  leave  behind  hardened  lava  and  frozen 
mud.  Only  too  true.  Only  too  familiar 
is  the  exaggerated  and  mis-shapen  ration- 
alism that  shuts  out  imagination,  distrusts 
all  sentiment,  despises  tradition,  and 
makes  short  work  alike  of  the  past,  and 
of  anything  like  collective  or  united  faith 
and  belief  in  the  present.  But  to  be  over- 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  21 

impatient  with  what  may  prove  by  and 
bye  to  be  fertilizing  Nile  floods,  is  pure 
foolishness.  They  will  subside,  and  a 
harvest  well  worth  saving  remain  for  the 
hand  of  the  reaper. 

Ardent  spirits  have  common  faults  in  Generous 
an  expectant  age.     We  know  them  all. 
They  are  so  apt  to  begin  where  they 

struggle. 

should  end.  Pierced  by  thought  of  the 
ills  in  the  world  around  them,  they  are 
overwhelmed  by  a  noble  impatience  to 
remove,  to  lessen,  to  abate.  Before  they 
have  set  sail,  they  insist  that  they  already 
see  some  new  planet  swimming  into  their 
ken,  they  already  touch  the  promised 
land.  An  abstract  a  priori  notion, 
formed  independently  of  experience,  inde- 
pendently of  evidence,  is  straightway 
clothed  with  all  the  sanctity  of  absolute 
principle.  Generous  aspiration,  exalted 


22  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

enthusiasm,  is  made  to  do  duty  for 
reasoned  scrutiny.  They  seize  every  fact 
or  circumstance  that  makes  their  way, 
they  are  blind  to  every  other.  Inflexible 
preconceptions  hold  the  helm.  They 
exaggerate.  Their  sense  of  proportion 
is  bad. 

If  party  politicians  are  with  us,  they 
will  observe,  that  in  this  place  to-night  I 
am  bound  to  carry  political  impartiality 
to  the  point  of  passion,  and  they  will  not 
quarrel  with  me  for  saying  that  such  vices 
of  political  method  as  I  have  hinted  at  — 
the  substitution  of  generous  illusion  for 
cool  induction  —  are  just  as  common 
among  glowing  conservatives  as  among 
glowing  liberals.  Nobody  in  any  camp 
will  quarrel  with  the  view  that  one  of  the 
urgent  needs  of  to-day  is  a  constant 
attempt  to  systematize  political  thoughts, 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  23 

and  to  bring  ideals  into  closer  touch  with 
fact.  There  can  be  no  reason  why  that 
should  turn  brave  and  hopeful  men 
into  narrow,  dry,  or  cold-hearted.  The 
French  Revolution  has  not  realized  its 
ideals.  But  then  no  more  has  the 
Reformation.  Even  as  to  Christianity 
itself,  one  of  the  most  famous  sayings 
of  the  eighteenth  century  -  -  that 
"Christianity  had  been  tried  and  failed, 
the  religion  of  Christ  remained  to  be 
tried,"  -  is  not  even  now  quite  out  of 
date.  In  a  thousand  forms,  the  Mani- 
chean  struggle  between  Good  and  Evil, 
between  Good  and  Better,  persists. 
About  one-third  of  the  inhabitants  of  our 
planet  are  Christian, -- the  adherents  of 
the  Roman  Communion  being  put  at 
240  millions,  the  Protestant  Communions 
at  150,  the  Greek  Church  at  100  millions. 


POLITICS  AND   mSTORY 


Misuse  of 
terms,  a 
main  root 
of  con- 
fusion. 


The  Jews,  only  10  millions,  —  lowest  in 
number,  but  possessing  a  vast  effective 
power  of  various  kinds  in  the  politics  of 
Europe.  The  relation  of  creeds  to  new 
phases  of  social  idealism  must  break  into 
cardinal  issues,  and  light  may  be  thrown 
upon  the  interesting  question  what  pro- 
portion of  the  ideas  that  men  live  with 
and  live  upon,  are  held  open  to  discussion 
in  their  minds,  and  how  many  of  them  are 
inexorable  and  sacrosanct.  There  is  good 
promise  that  the  common  temper  of 
willingness  to  try  all  things,  and  hold  fast 
that  which  is  good,  will  prevail.1 

It  will  do  us  no  harm  to  digest  a  sober- 
ing thought  from  Locke:  "If  any  one 
shall  well  consider  the  errors  and  obscur- 
ity, the  mistakes  and  confusion,  that  are 

1  For  a  remarkable  consideration  of  Religion  in  respect  of 
Politics,  see  Lord  Hugh  Cecil's  little  volume,  Conservatism 
(Williams  and  Norgate,  1912). 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  25 

spread  in  the  world  by  an  ill  use  of  words, 
he  will  find  some  reason  to  doubt  whether 
language,  as  it  has  been  employed,  has 
contributed  more  to  the  improvement  or 
hindrance  of  knowledge  among  man- 
kind." Dismal  as  this  may  be  at  any 
time,  how  especially  perturbing  to  people 
with  such  questions  before  them,  as  we 
are  called  upon  to  face  to-day.  Now,  if 
ever,  what  mistakes  and  confusion  are 
likely  to  follow  an  ill  use  of  political  words, 
and  of  the  ideas  that  words  stand  for. 
What  would  become  of  a  lawyer  in  the 
Courts  who  argued  his  cases  with  the 
looseness  in  point  and  language,  the 
disregard  of  apt  precedents,  the  slack 
concatenation  of  premiss  and  conclusion, 
the  readiness  to  take  one  authority  for 
as  good  as  another, -- which  even  the 
best  of  us  so  often  find  good  enough  for 


26  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

politics  ?  Is  there  any  other  field  where 
Bacon's  hoary  idols  of  Theatre,  Tribe, 
Market  Place,  and  Cave,  keep  such 
contented  house  together  ?  Five-and- 
twenty  centuries  have  passed  since  one 
great  Greek  historian,  perhaps  casting  a 
stone  at  another,  rebuked  in  famous 
words  the  ignorant  carelessness  of  man- 
kind. "  People  do  not  distinguish  ;  with- 
out a  test  they  take  things  from  one 
another  :  even  on  things  of  their  own  day, 
not  dulled  in  memory  by  time,  Hellenes 
are  apt  to  be  all  wrong.  So  little  pains 
will  most  men  take  in  search  for  truth  :  so 
much  more  readily  they  turn  to  what  comes 
first."1 

An  To  these  hints  of  mine  an  American 

illustration,    newspaper  supplied  an  apt  illustration. 


1  Thuc.  i.  20  ',  ovrcas  draXadrwpos  TO?J  woXXots  •>]  f^TTjais  rrjs 
\-rjOetas  Kal  (irl  rd  e-roF/xa  juaXXov  Tpti 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  27 

The  number  of  questions,  says  the  writer, 
now  before  the  American  people,  on  which 
it  is  urgent  that  they  should  have  an 
intelligent  opinion,  is  staggering.  Take 
one  of  the  most  intricate  of  them  all, 
what  to  do  with  Trusts.  How  are  the 
masses  going  to  know  the  precise  legal 
and  financial  effect  of  the  decree  of  the 
court  dissolving  the  Tobacco  Trust? 
They  see  eminent  lawyers  radically  dif- 
fering. They  hear  politicians  railing. 
Nobody  can  seriously  argue  that  the 
intricacies  of  Trust  repression  and  regula- 
tion can  be  mastered  by  "the  wisdom  of 
the  people."  What  the  people  can  do  is 
to  form  clear  and  strong  convictions  upon 
the  fundamental  conceptions  that  under- 
lie the  whole  question.  A  sound  public 
opinion  can  be  formed  on  the  main 
questions,  whether  we  should  try  to 


28  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

maintain  in  trade  and  industry  the  possi- 
bility of  effective  competition,  or  whether 
combination  and  monopoly  should  be 
undertaken,  controlled,  and  supervised 
by  the  State.  Get  these  essentials 
settled,  then  legislative,  executive,  and 
tribunals  can  find  proper  and  effective 
form.  Such  is  an  American  case.  It 
would  be  easy,  though  more  delicate,  for 
us  to  find  illustrations  quite  as  apt  in  the 
United  Kingdom  as  in  the  United  States. 
Easy  words  The  ideas  and  words  that  seem  simplest 
quarrels.  turn  out  most  complex.  If  anybody 
doubts,  ask  him  to  try  his  hand,  say  on 
Liberty,  Equality,  and  Fraternity.1  He 
will  be  very  lucky  if,  besides  being  com- 

1  Any  one  who  seeks  to  explore  this  all-important  field, 
should  not  miss  F.  W.  Maitland,  Collected  Papers,  i.  1-161 ; 
nor  Sir  James  Stephen's  three  little  volumes,  Horce  Sabbaticce 
(1892),  full  of  hard  close  thinking,  needing  answer  and  capable 
of  answer. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  29 

plex,  he  does  not  find  their  contents  and 
applications  directly  self-contradictory. 
Of  liberty,  we  have  been  told  on  the  best 
authority,  there  are  two  hundred  defini- 
tions. Yet,  said  Lincoln  in  their  war, 
"the  world  has  never  had  a  good  defini- 
tion of  the  word  liberty,  and  the  American 
people,  just  now,  are  much  in  want  of  one. 
We  all  declare  for  liberty;  but  in  using 
the  same  word  we  do  not  all  mean  the 
same  thing.  We  assume  the  word  lib- 
erty may  mean  for  each  man  to  do  as 
he  pleases  with  himself,  and  the  product 
of  his  labour ;  while  with  others  the  same 
word  may  mean  for  some  men  to  do  as 
they  please  with  other  men,  and  the 
product  of  other  men's  labour." 

Then  men  will  not  soon  forget  Cavour's 
memorable  formula  "A  free  Church  in  a 
free  State."  What  could  be  simpler, 


30  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

what  more  direct,  what  more  pleasant  and 
easy  jingle  to  the  politician's  ear  ?  Yet 
of  what  harsh  and  intractable  discords 
was  that  theme  the  prelude  ?  The  erec- 
tion of  a  kingdom  of  Italy  with  Rome 
for  its  capital,  was  too  momentous  an 
event  to  be  comprised  in  one  political 
formula.  It  is  no  hallucination  to  de- 
scribe it  as  the  most  important  fact  in 
European  history  for  two  centuries,1  that 
is  to  say  since  the  Peace  of  Westphalia. 
One  aspect  of  commanding  significance 
these  two  supreme  landmarks  present  in 
common.  Each  sets  the  seal  upon  a 
transmutation  as  memorable  for  States  as 
Churches  :  from  each  of  them,  the  system 
and  relations  between  political  authority 
and  spiritual  emerge  with  changed  foun- 

1  Le  Droit  public  et  V Europe  Moderne.    De  la  Guerronniere, 
i.  332. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  31 

dations  and  renovated  ordering.  The 
system  of  the  middle  age  is  over,  though 
ponderous  links  of  the  broken  chain  still 
hang  round  the  emancipated  ruler's  neck. 

The  most  living  and  familiar  of  all  the  Religious 
phrases  in  the  controversy  of  our  times  is 
Religious  Liberty :  in  France  and  Italy 
a  burning  question ;  in  Ireland,  Scotland, 
and  even  England,  by  no  means  a  mere 
handful  of  dead  historic  ashes.  Familiar 
as  it  is,  the  designation  covers  entirely 
diverse  meanings.  Leo  XIII.  found  two 
of  them  in  liberty  of  conscience :  one, 
liberty  of  the  individual  to  follow  God's 
commands ;  the  other,  freedom  to  pre- 
scribe the  divine  precepts  at  his  own 
discretion.  Sometimes  religious  liberty 
stands  for  unfettered  freedom  in  uttering 
and  advocating  opinion  on  issues  of 
theology,  —  its  foundations  as  recorded 


32  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

truth,  its  interpretations  of  binding  doc- 
trine, its  consistency,  or  its  complete  and 
wholesale  incompatibility,  with  accepted 
standards  and  methods  in  the  ever- 
extending  area  of  positive  knowledge  and 
intrepid  criticism.  Sometimes  it  desig- 
nates the  claim  of  a  religious  body  to 
impose  upon  faithful  and  voluntary 
members,  what  rules  as  to  marriage, 
education,  congregation,  and  the  rest,  its 
commanding  ecclesiastics  may  choose, 
with  no  regard  either  to  surrounding 
social  prepossessions,  or  to  the  conven- 
ience of  the  State.  Is  the  principle  of 
religious  liberty  violated  when  the  police 
forbid  a  Catholic  procession  through  the 
streets  of  Westminster  ?  Or  when  a 
congregation  of  French  monks  or  nuns 
is  sent  packing  ?  Or  when  an  English 
court  of  law,  as  happened  only  a  few  years 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  33 

ago,  pronounces  null  and  void  a  bequest 
to  a  society  holding  opinions  contrary 
to  Christianity  ?  What  of  all  the  strenu- 
ous laws  and  unflinching  executive  acts  in 
both  hemispheres,  for  a  century  and  a 
half,  against  the  dreaded  Society  of 
Jesus  ?  Greeks  and  other  people  in  the 
seventh  and  eighth  centuries,  in  their 
struggle  with  imperial  authority,  were 
fond  of  using  religious  watchwords  that 
were  really  inspired  by  political  and 
racial  resentments.  And  such  mal- 
practice has  not  even  yet  quitted  highly 
civilized  communities  not  so  remote  from 
us  as  is  Stamboul.  Still,  we  may  fairly 
say  that  in  our  State  at  least,  within  a 
single  generation,  a  law  of  tolerance  — 
not  indifference,  not  scepticism,  not  dis- 
belief, but  one  of  those  deep,  silent 
transformations  that  make  history  endur- 


34  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

able  —  has  really  worked  its  way  not 
merely  into  our  statutes  and  courts  of 
justice,  but  into  manners,  usage,  and  the 
common  habits  of  men's  minds. 
Forms  of  In  the  vast  field  of  questions  connected 
ment  with  Forms  of  Government,  terms  in  the 
commonest  employment  abound  in  con- 
fusion. Sir  George  Lewis,  who  was 
Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  in  1857, 
and  the  most  widely  learned  man  that 
ever  held  that  office,  wrote  a  little  book 
on  what  he  styled  the  use  and  abuse  of 
political  terms.  He  does  not  really  carry 
things  much  further  than  the  primitive 
debate  of  the  seven  Persian  noblemen 
five  centuries  before  Christ.1  The  book 
has  little  sap,  but  it  puts  useful  posers  as 
to  the  exact  classification,  for  instance,  of 
the  varieties  of  republic  and  monarchy. 

1  Herodotus,  iii. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  35 

It  is  democracy  where  a  majority  of 
adult  males  have  direct  legal  influence 
in  the  formation  of  the  sovereign  body. 
It  is  aristocracy  where  this  majority  have 
no  direct  legal  influence.  Is  democracy 
a  system  in  which  the  many  govern  or, 
as  Aristotle  supposed,  a  system  in  which 
the  poor  govern  ?  Is  it  enough  to  dis- 
patch democracy  as  a  system  where  the 
career  is  open  to  the  talents  ?  And  so 
forth,  with  a  general  suggestion  of  loose 
and  inapplicable  terms  being  the  links 
that  chain  men  to  unreasonable  practices. 
As  if  in  fact,  our  incurable  trick  of  taking 
a  word  for  a  thing  were  not  the  root  of 
half  the  mischiefs  of  the  world.  A  new 
term  has  gained  strong  hold  since  Lewis's 
time,  but  Sociocracy,  the  hybrid  name 
sometimes  given  to  our  still  dubious 
accommodation  between  democratic 


36  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

expansion  and  plutocracy,  is  not  yet 
acclimatized.  Our  own  famous  ruling 
assembly  has  been  called  the  mother  of 
parliaments,  and  the  congenial  image 
justly  stirs  our  national  pride.  Yet 
differences  in  power  and  the  source  of 
power  between  parent  and  progeny, 
almost  surpass  resemblances.  Take  the 
House  of  Commons  itself.  Even  writers 
of  the  first  rank  speak  of  its  doings,  and 
temper,  and  prerogative  during  the  war 
with  the  American  Colonies,  or  the  long 
war  against  Napoleon,  as  if  the  House  of 
Commons  during  either  of  those  two 
momentous  episodes  was  the  same  as 
the  House  of  Commons  that  rules  over 
us  to-day  —  that  is  to  say  was  chosen  by 
the  popular  voice  and  national  acclama- 
tion, instead  of  being,  as  it  was,  the 
nominee  of  a  handful  of  a  privileged  order. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  37 

Then  Aristocracy  in  England  has  been  Aristocracy. 
too  essentially  political,  —  and  for  other 
reasons,  —  to  stand  out  as  pure  caste. 
Even  the  vital  caste-mark  of  refusing 
commensality  has  broken  down.  It  is 
true  that  as  a  member  of  old  standing  in 
the  House  of  Lords  said  to  a  novice  just 
come  up  from  the  Commons,  "You 
know,  we  are  all  like  friends  here,"  and 
in  a  social  sense  this  may  be  true  enough. 
But  let  me  remind  you  that  what  com- 
petent observers  justly  describe  as  one 
of  the  greatest  improvements  in  public 
affairs  ever  proposed  by  any  govern- 
ment —  the  change  from  royal  and 
patrician  patronage  in  the  Civil  Service 
to  open  competition  —  was  carried  in  a 
cabinet  of  fifteen,  of  which  Mr.  Glad- 
stone said  that  no  cabinet  could  have 
been  more  aristocratically  composed : 


38  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

only  one  member  of  it  did  not  belong  to 
that  class,  and  that  was  himself.  The 
case  is  taken  by  his  biographer  as  showing 
in  how  unique  a  degree  that  great  man 
combined  profound  democratic  instinct 
with  the  spirit  of  good  government,  - 
the  instinct  of  popular  equality  with  the 
scientific  spirit  of  the  enlightened  ad- 
ministrator. 

Monarchy  In  all  the  vocabularies  and  catechisms 
Re  ubiic  °^  government,  no  idea  has  fired  such 
energy  and  devotion  in  the  human  breast, 
as  the  idolized  name  of  Republic,  unless, 
to  be  sure,  it  may  be  the  name  and  the 
idea  of  Monarchy.  In  passionate  enthu- 
siasm, as  well  as  in  cogent  force  of  prac- 
tical reason,  Legitimist  and  Republican 
have  been  many  a  time  well  matched. 
Yet  how  profoundly  diverse  in  essence, 
record,  and  mechanism,  the  multiple 


POLITICS  AND   HISTORY  39 

systems  that  are  labelled  by  the  common 
name  of  Republic.  Cromwell  was  dicta- 
tor rather  than  republican.  Venice  was 
of  radically  different  type  from  Florence. 
The  republic  that  emerged  after  the 
Swiss  cantons  had  thrown  off  the  yoke  of 
Austria,  was  in  form  and  foundation 
different  from  the  Dutch  system  after 
the  overthrow  of  Spain.  The  first  French 
Republic  was  a  very  different  structure 
from  the  second,  and  the  second  from  the 
third,  and  so  are  they  both  from  the 
United  States  of  America.  I  need  not 
speak  of  the  republics  where  in  South 
America  Latin  and  Catholic  civilization 
follows  a  strange  and  devious  course, 
and  where  republic  means  no  more  as  a 
form  of  government,  than  is  meant  by 
monarchy  in  the  distracted  Balkans. 
Take  the  Legitimist,  —  a  name  in- 


40  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

vented  for  the  Bourbon  line  when  the 
first  Republic  and  first  Empire  were 
swept  away  at  Vienna  in  1815.  If  we 
are  to  understand  by  legitimate  a  govern- 
ment that  has  acquired  possession  and 
authority  on  the  ground  of  acknowledged 
title  through  regular  succession,  treaties, 
or  conquest  recognized  as  legitimate,  — 
what  of  the  European  monarchies  of 
to-day  satisfy  legitimist  standards  ?  In 
England,  as  we  all  know,  succession  to  the 
throne  rests  upon  a  revolution, -- the 
result  of  one  of  those  political  expediencies 
that  amount  to  a  necessity,  —  though 
masters  of  reasoned  eloquence,  from 
Burke  to  Macaulay,  have  put  upon  it  a 
saving  face  of  continuous  law  and  order. 
In  Italy,  Belgium,  Sweden,  Norway, 
the  sovereign  wears  a  revolutionary 
crown. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  41 

Even  the  consecrated  name  of  Public  Public 
Opinion,  —  queen  of  the  world,  as  it  has 
been  so  chivalrously  called  —  has  many 
values.  One  constitutional  writer  in 
whom  learning  has  been  by  no  means 
fatal  to  wit  —  and  neither  law  nor  politics 
is  without  considerable  points  of  humour 
-  puts  it  that  the  opinion  of  Parliament 
is  the  opinion  of  yesterday,  and  the 
opinion  of  judges  is  that  of  the  day  before 
yesterday.  That  is,  the  judges  go  by 
precedent  and  old  canons  of  interpre- 
tation, while  Parliament  makes  laws, 
imposes  taxes,  regulates  foreign  rela- 
tions, in  response  to  movements  out- 
side. 

In  arguing  for  or  against  an  institution, 
who  draws  due  distinctions  between  its 
formal  and  legal  character,  and  its  actual 
work  in  practice  ?  Or  makes  allowance 


42  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

for  the  spirit  of  those  who  carry  it  on  ? 
Or  for  the  weight  of  its  traditional  associa- 
tions ?  In  politics  is  it  the  voice  of 
the  electorate  ?  Are  there  any  better 
grounds  for  regarding  either  a  majority 
or  a  plurality  of  votes,  than  that  it  is  a 
good  working  political  rule  ?  Does  the 
rule  work  well  enough  in  general  practice, 
to  make  new  expedients  -  -  Plebiscites, 
Referendums,  and  the  rest  —  pieces  of 
supererogation,  calculated  to  shred  away 
the  concentrated  force  of  a  governing 
representative  assembly  ?  A  very  inter- 
esting writer  of  our  own  time l  emphasizes 
the  non-rational  element  in  politics,  - 
impulses,  instinct,  reaction.  Mr.  Gra- 
ham Wallas  insists  that  the  empirical 
art  of  politics  consists  largely  in  the 
creation  of  opinion  by  the  deliberate 

1  Human  Nature  in  Politics,  by  Graham  Wallas,  1908. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  43 

exploitation  of  non-conscious  non-rational 
inference.  This  at  least  is  true  that 
empirical  practitioners  find  it  hard  to 
forecast  the  decisive  elements.  The  press 
is  no  safe  barometer.  In  at  least  three 
remarkable  parliamentary  elections  since 
1874,  the  result  has  been  an  immense 
surprise  to  those  who  had  regarded  only 
the  line  of  the  most  widely  read  journals 
in  the  most  important  areas :  the  jour- 
nals went  on  one  side,  the  great  major- 
ity of  electors  voted  the  other.  Lord 
Beaconsfield  did  not  expect  his  sweeping 
repulse  in  1880.  Of  Palmers  ton  it  was 
said  by  Clarendon  that  he  mistook  popu- 
lar applause  for  real  opinion.  Nothing 
is  so  hard,  either  to  reckon  or  to  identify. 
The  idealist  is  angry  or  despondent  when 
he  finds  the  public  deaf.  Literary  satire 
likens  popular  indifference  towards  new 


44  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

ideas  to  the  dogs  barking  at  a  stranger. 
Or  the  satirist  bethinks  himself  of  the 
ass  who  prefers  a  bundle  of  hay  to  a  dozen 
gold  pieces.  It  would  be  easy  to  make  a 
good  case  both  for  the  two  honest  animals 
and  for  the  public,  and  in  truth  the  satire 
is  idle.  No  doubt  ripe  judgments  and 
sensibly  trained  minds  are  not  always 
received  with  open  arms.  The  hard  and 
strenuous  pre-occupations  of  life  naturally 
first  bespeak  the  common  eye.  But  the 
ripe  temper,  if  apt  and  patient,  slowly 
soaks  its  way,  and  well-stamped  coins 
find  their  currency.  Representative 
government  exists  to-day  in  a  hundred 
different  forms,  depending  on  a  hundred 
differences  in  social  state  and  history, 
and  nobody  claims  for  public  opinion  in 
all  or  any  of  them  either  sanctity  or 
infallibility.  But  to  make  a  mock  of  it, 


POLITICS  AND  fflSTORY  45 

is  merely  to  quarrel  with  human  life. 
We  all  know  the  shortcomings  in  political 
opinion  and  character  —  the  fatal  con- 
tentment with  simple  answers  to  complex 
questions ;  the  readiness,  as  Hobbes  put 
it,  to  turn  against  reason,  if  reason  is 
against  you ;  violent  over-estimate  of 
petty  things ;  vehement  agitation  one 
day,  reaction  as  vehement  the  other  way 
the  next ;  money  freely  laid  on  a  flashing 
favourite  this  week,  deep  curses  on  what 
has  proved  the  wrong  horse  the  week 
after;  haste;  moral  cowardice;  futility. 
But  if  anybody  supposes  that  these  mis- 
chiefs are  peculiar  to  parliaments  or 
democracy,  he  must  be  strangely  ill-read 
in  the  annals  of  military  despot- 
ism, absolute  personal  power,  central- 
ized bureaucracy,  exalted  ceremonial 
courts. 


46  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

III 

To-day1  as  it  happens,  is  the  anniver- 
Rousseau.  sarv  °f  the  birth  of  Rousseau  a  couple  of 
hundred  years  ago.  In  the  French 
Chamber,  on  a  proposal  last  week  to  vote 
public  money  for  its  celebration,  one 
side  argued  that  it  was  absurd  to  magnify 
the  father  of  anarchist  theories,  at  a 
moment  when  police  were  shooting  down 
anarchist  bandits  in  the  suburbs  of  Paris. 
The  other  side  insisted  that  Rousseau 
was  the  precursor  of  modern  conceptions 
of  social  justice,  and  achieved  for  all 
time  decisive  and  persistent  influence  over 
French,  German,  Russian  literature.  A 
dozen  books  in  political  literature  - 
Grotius,  On  the  Rights  of  War  and  Peace 
(1625),  for  instance,  and  Adam  Smith's 

1  July  12,  1912. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  47 

Wealth  of  Nations  (1776),  —  rank  in  his- 
tory as  acts,  not  books.  Whether  a 
dozen  or  a  hundred,  the  Social  Contract 
assuredly  was  one.  The  Institutions 
of  the  Christian  Religion,  launched  in 
Geneva  two  centuries  before  Rousseau, 
was  another.  But  Calvin,  the  Protestant 
pontiff  from  France,  was  no  theorist  as 
Rousseau  was.  The  rock  on  which  he 
built  his  Church  was  his  own  unconquer- 
able will  and  unflinching  power  to  meet 
occasion.  This  it  was,  not  merely 
doctrines  and  forms  of  theologic  faith, 
that  have  made  him  one  of  the  com- 
manding forces  in  the  annals  of  the  world. 
Let  us  note  in  passing  that  our  fashion- 
able idolatry  of  great  States  cannot  blind 
us  to  the  cardinal  fact  that  self-govern- 
ment, threatened  with  death  when 
Protestantism  appeared  upon  the  stage, 


48  POLITICS  AND   HISTORY 

was  saved  by  three  small  communities  so 
little  imperial  in  scope  and  in  ideals  as 
Holland,  Switzerland,  and  Scotland. 
Taking  Rousseau  and  Calvin  together, 
Geneva  stands  first  of  the  three. 
The  test  of  Burke  scourged  Rousseau's  name  and 
mind  is*  n*s  work  with  an  energy  only  less  savage 
actuality.  than  his  onslaught  in  the  same  page 
upon  Charles  II.  He  rejoiced  that 
Rousseau  had  none  of  the  popularity  here 
that  followed  him  over  the  continent 
of  Europe.  Burke  went  on,  as  Words- 
worth saw  him,  forewarning,  denounc- 
ing, launching  forth  keen  ridicule  against 
all  systems  built  on  abstract  right,  pro- 
claiming the  majesty  of  Institutes  and 
Laws  hallowed  by  time,  "with  high  dis- 
dain exploding  upstart  theory."  Yet 
Maine,  the  most  eminent  English  mem- 
ber of  the  Burkian  school  —  I  do  not 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  49 

forget  Sir  James  Mackintosh  —  tells  us 
that  Rousseau,  without  learning,  with 
few  virtues,  and  with  no  strength  of 
character,  has  nevertheless  stamped  him- 
self ineffaceably  on  history  by  the  force 
of  a  vivid  imagination  and  a  genuine 
love  for  his  fellow  men,  for  which  much 
will  always  have  to  be  forgiven  him.  It 
was  Bentham  who  so  well  put  it  that  if 
you  want  to  win  mankind,  you  must 
make  them  think  you  love  them,  and  the 
best  way  to  make  them  think  you  love 
them,  is  to  love  them  in  reality.  Rous- 
seau's idyll  of  the  Savoyard  Vicar  that 
fascinated  the  sensibilities  of  Europe, 
and  struck  a  new  note  in  imagination  and 
romance,  came  from  the  same  brain  and 
heart  as  the  political  projectiles  that 
served  the  turn  of  Robespierre,  and  a  host 
of  greater  and  better  men.  So  the  storm 


50  POLITICS  AND   HISTORY 

of  a  fresh  world-battle  opened.  In 
essence  it  was  not  new :  it  was  a  re-adjust- 
ment to  new  occasion  of  thoughts  and 
schemes  that  were  very  old.  The  names 
of  Hobbes,  Filmer,  Sidney,  Milton, 
Harrington,  are  enough  to  recall  the 
controversies  upon  the  roots  of  govern- 
ment and  law,  jus  naturce,  jus  gentium, 
and  so  forth,  all  over  Europe,  a  century  be- 
fore. The  historian  of  political  philoso- 
phy takes  us  back  to  centuries  earlier  still. 
Tradition,  custom,  usage,  convention,  es- 
tablished institutions  —  History  on  one 
side,  Law  of  Nature  and  Rights  of  Man  on 
the  other.  The  feud  reached  not  politics 
only ;  it  penetrated  philosophy,  art,  letters, 
churches,  education,  in  countless  forms ; 
for,  we  may  be  sure,  the  same  aspects  and 
influences  that  strike  deep  on  politics, 
strike  deep  all  round.  Here  is  the  stamp 


POLITICS  AND   mSTORY  51 

of  one  of  the  great  ages,  whose  alternation 
and  succession  in  history  mark  its  lode- 
stars, and  signalize  its  title  to  men's  praise. 

You  know  the  electrifying  sentence  of  Man  free- 
Rousseau's  Social  Contract:  "Man  is 
born  free,  and  everywhere  he  is  in  chains. 
One  supposes  himself  the  master  of  others, 
who  is  none  the  less  for  that  more  of  a 
slave  than  they  are."  We  need  take 
no  pains  in  our  later  days  of  Heredity 
as  one  of  the  established  laws  of  animal 
existence,  to  analyze  the  description  of 
man  as  born  free ;  and  for  that  matter 
the  idea  was  older  and  played  its  part 
in  writers  older  and  more  respectable 
than  Rousseau.  It  is  nearer  the  mark, 
so  far  at  any  rate  as  the  civilized  Euro- 
pean of  to-day  is  concerned,  to  say  that 
he  is  born  two  thousand  years  old. 
That  is  what  history  means  to  our 


52  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

plain  man,  if  he  had  time  and  patience 
to  meditate  beyond  the  hour.  And  it  is 
worth  observing  as  we  pass  the  point 
of  freedom,  that  Rousseau  himself 
insisted  that  everybody  should  pledge 
himself  to  belief  in  the  existence  of  an 
omnipotent  and  beneficent  divinity,  in 
a  life  to  come  where  the  just  should  be 
very  happy,  and  the  wicked  very  miser- 
able. To  these  and  other  articles,  he 
said,  every  citizen  should  adhere,  not  as 
dogmas  of  religion,  but  as  sentiments 
of  sociability.  If  he  broke  away  from 
them,  a  man  should  be  punished  by 
exile  or  death,  and  rationalistic  heads 
were  actually  struck  off  in  1794,  strictly 
and  avowedly  on  Rousseau's  principle, 
just  as  Servetus  perished  in  flames  that 
Calvin  kindled,  and  Sir  Thomas  More's 
head  was  cut  off  by  King  Henry  VIII. 


POLITICS  AND   HISTORY  53 

If,  however,  the  critic  lets  inconsistency 
detain  him,  he  is  lost.  Only  let  us  add 
as  a  pendant  to  Rousseau's  dictum,  a  no 
less  bold  and  much  truer  dictum,  that 
man  is  born  intolerant,  and  of  all  ideas 
toleration  would  seem  to  be  in  the  general 
mind  the  very  latest. 

It  is  easy  for  the  judicious  observer  of  a  The  sower's 
later  day  to  riddle  a  book  like  the  Social 
Contract  with  shot  and  shell  of  logic, 
doctrine,  figures,  history ;  just  as  it  was 
easy  for  Dr.  Johnson  to  scold  Gray's 
Elegy,  but  none  the  less  the  poem  re- 
mained an  eternal  delight  and  solace  for 
the  hearts  of  wearied  men.  More  than 
one  distinguished  master  of  political  and 
legal  philosophy  in  our  own  day  and 
generation  has  subjected  it  to  search- 
ing analysis,  of  weight  and  significance.1 

1  E.g.  Bosanquet's  Philosophical  Theory  of  the  State,  1899. 


54  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

But  what  matters  more  than  logic,  or 
dialectic  cut-and-thrust,  is  history,  - 
relations  of  present  to  past,  leading  ante- 
cedents, external  forces,  incidents,  and 
the  long  tale  of  consummating  circum- 
stance. How  often  do  miscalculations  in 
the  statesman,  like  narrowness  and  blun- 
der in  the  historian,  spring  from  neglect 
of  the  pregnant  and  illuminating  truth 
that  deeper  than  men's  opinions  are  the 
sentiment  and  circumstances  by  which 
opinion  is  predetermined.  "What  it  is 
important  for  us  to  know  with  respect  to 
our  own  age,  or  every  age,  is  not  its 
peculiar  opinions,  but  the  complex  elements 
of  that  moral  feeling  and  character,  in 
which  as  in  their  congenial  soil  opinions 
grow."  1  In  these  words  you  have  a  truth, 
abounding  in  enrichment,  power,  insight, 

1  Mark  Pattison's  Essays,  i.  264. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  55 

and  self-collection,  for  every  patient  stu- 
dent of  mankind,  —  such  a  student  as 
in  our  better  hours  of  the  diviner  mind 
it  is  the  business  of  us  all  to  try  to  be. 

The  power  of  a  political  book,  then, 
depends  on  aptness  for  occasion  as  occa- 
sions emerge.  "What  wonderful  things 
are  events,"  cries  somebody  in  one  of 
Disraeli's  novels;  "the  least  are  of 
greater  importance  than  the  most  sub- 
lime and  comprehensive  speculations  !" 
Too  widely  and  fantastically  said  for 
cool  philosophy,  no  doubt;  yet  a  fertile 
truth  for  critics.  Crop  depends  on  soil 
as  well  as  seed.  It  is  not  abstract  or 
absolute  strength  in  argument  or  con- 
clusion, but  the  fact,  half-accident,  of 
its  happening  to  supply  an  exciting,  im- 
pressive, persuasive,  attack  or  defence, 
or  some  set  of  formulae  that  the  passion, 


56  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

need,  or  curiosity  of  the  hour  demands. 
Books,  doctrines,  ideas  have  been  com- 
pared to  the  flowers  in  a  garden.  'Tis 
not  always  the  best  argument  that  pre- 
vails, and  the  gardener  wins  the  prize 
who  chooses  his  season  right.  How 
much  of  their  time  do  even  good  writers 
pass  in  minting  coin  that  has  no  currency. 
And  in  passing  from  our  glorious  dome  of 
printed  books  in  the  British  Museum, 
to  the  sepulchral  monuments  in  another 
department,  we  may  sometimes  think 
that  in  vitality  there  is  not  much  to 
choose  between  books  that  once  shook 
the  world,  and  the  mummies  of  Egyptian 
The  event  kings.  No  piece  of  literature  ever  had 

decides. 

more  instant  and  wide-reaching  power 
than  Chateaubriand's  Genie  du  Chris- 
tianisme  (1802).  As  an  argumentative 
apology  it  is  counted  worthless  even  by 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  57 

those  who  most  welcome  its  effect.  A 
friend  told  him  that  a  picturesque  stroke 
of  memory  from  his  travels,  a  passionate 
phrase,  a  fine  thought,  would  win  him 
more  readers  than  a  mountain  of 
Benedictine  erudition.  He  took  the  hint, 
and  his  historic  knowledge  is  little  better 
than  decoration.  The  Frenchmen  who 
thought  seriously  about  the  genius  of 
Christianity,  would  have  found  more  of 
what  they  wanted  in  half-a-dozen  ser- 
mons of  Bossuet  or  half-a-dozen  pages  of 
Pascal,  not  to  name  Augustine  or  the 
Imitatio,  than  in  all  that  was  to  be  found 
in  the  genius  of  Chateaubriand.  But 
then  as  it  happened  Bonaparte  had  just 
made  his  Concordat  with  Pope  Pius ;  he 
had  played  his  part  in  solemn  pomp  at 
Notre  Dame,  once  more  formally  asso- 
ciating religion  with  the  State;  he  had 


58  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

signed  the  peace  with  England  at  Amiens  ; 
a  rainbow  for  the  moment  shone  on  storm- 
driven  skies  and  the  dark  tribulations  of 
men.  No  book  was  ever  happier  in  its 
time,  but  to  neither  book  nor  influence 
could  there  be  allotted  length  of  days. 
As  with  books,  so  with  principles. 
Men,  whether  as  bodies  or  individuals, 
pick  out  as  much  from  a  principle  and 
its  plainer  corollaries,  as  convenience 
Three  great  and  their  purpose  needs.  The  possible 
limitations  of  logical  inference  are 
widened  or  narrowed  or  thrust  aside 
pointblank,  just  as  actual  necessity 
dictates.  The  best  syllogism  is  swept 
down  by  trumpet-blasts  of  Public  Safety, 
Social  Order,  and  other  fair  names  for  a 
Reign  of  Terror.  A  learned  American 
judge  found  three  great  instruments  in 
human  history  —  the  Ten  Command- 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  59 

ments,  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  and 
the  Declaration  of  American  Indepen- 
dence. This  was  perhaps  no  more  than  a 
flash  of  obiter  dictum,  and  undoubtedly 
the  bench  exposed  surface  to  a  telling 
cross-examination.  Yet  after  all  Mount 
Sinai,  the  Mount  of  Olives,  and  State- 
House  Yard  in  Philadelphia  hold  com- 
manding stations  in  the  courses  of  the 
sun.  What  we  have  to  realize  is  the 
effulgence  with  which  hopeful  words, 
glittering  ideas,  fervid  exhortations,  and 
reforming  instruments,  burst  upon  com- 
munities oppressed  by  wrong,  sunk  and 
sodden  in  care,  fired  by  passions  of  re- 
ligion, race,  liberty,  property  -  -  those 
eternal  fields  of  mortal  struggle.  Noth- 
ing is  easier  than  to  expose  fallacies  in 
the  Declaration  of  Independence.  The 
point  is  that,  as  an  American  historian 


60  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

records  with  truth,  it  was  "the  genuine 
effusion  of  the  soul  of  the  country  at  the 
time." 

Yet  what  a  sound  instinct  for  politics 
addressed  to  Englishmen  of  the  stamp 
of  the  American  Colonists,  inspired 
Thomas  Paine  when  he  fired  the  revolu- 
tionary train  by  the  most  influential 
Oracles  political  piece  that  ever  was  composed, 
'*  an(^  called  it  by  the  wholesome,  persua- 
sive, and  well-justified  name  of  Common 
Sense.  Quarrels  about  the  best  form 
of  government,  the  balance  of  orders  in 
the  State,  even  natural  rights,  were 
comparatively  old  stories.  Men  are 
wont  to  use  so  much  of  such  large 
oracular  deliverances  as  the  moment 
asks.  Moral  issues,  as  if  almost  by 
accident,  suddenly  take  fire  and  set  a 
community  in  a  blaze.  Four  score  and 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  61 

seven  years  passed,  before  a  nobler 
President  than  Jefferson  was  able  to 
bring  his  country  round  to  his  faith,  that 
if  slavery  is  not  wrong,  nothing  is  wrong. 
Thus  it  is  not  abstract  books  that  thrive 
in  the  day  of  trouble  on  either  side  of  the 
Atlantic  Ocean.  Who  cares  to  criticise 
the  words  in  the  famous  Gettysburg 
speech  about  a  nation  "conceived  in 
liberty  and  dedicated  to  the  proposi- 
tion that  all  men  are  created  equal "  ? 
But  it  was,  as  Burke  said,  not  on  ab- 
stract politics,  but  on  the  point  of  taxes, 
that  the  ablest  pens  and  most  eloquent 
tongues  have  been  exercised,  the  stoutest 
spirits  have  acted  and  suffered.  They 
took  infinite  pains  to  set  up  as  a  funda- 
mental principle  that  in  all  monarchies 
the  people  must  in  effect  themselves 
mediately  or  immediately  possess  the 


62  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

power  of  granting  their  own  money, 
or  no  shadow  of  liberty  could  subsist.1 
Not  that  rates  and  taxes  are  everything, 
or  the  taxgatherer  the  worst  of  our 
enemies.  Of  this,  the  most  powerful 
example  was  Burke  himself.  After  his 
splendid  pieces  on  the  contest  with  the 
American  colonies,  which  I  still  submit 
to  you  as  the  profoundest  manual  of 
civil  wisdom  that  our  greatest  literature 
possesses,  the  storm  that  the  colonial 
victory  had  helped  to  gather,  broke 
violently  over  monarchical  France. 
Burke,  with  marvellous  prescience, 
divined  in  detail  the  havoc  that  would 
follow;  he  became  an  oracle  of  the 
emigrant  French  nobles  on  the  Rhine,  and 
inspirer  of  the  cogent  pamphleteers  like 
Gentz,  who  served  or  led  Metternich  at 

1  Speech  on  Conciliation,  March  22,  1775, 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  63 

Vienna.  Not  unjust  rates  and  taxes, 
but  the  overthrow  of  all  the  high  historic 
common-places  fired  the  Reflections,  and 
the  Regicide  Peace.  All  the  reactionary 
forces  of  Europe  found  the  voice  they 
needed.  Only,  in  seeking  cause  and 
effect,  let  us  not  confuse  the  voice  with 
the  force.  Lamartine's  story  of  the 
Girondins  on  the  eve  of  1848,  Thiers' 
story  of  the  first  empire  on  the  eve  of  the 
second,  Mrs.  Stowe's  picture  of  slavery, 
are  all  books  that  suffused  reason  with 
passion,  and  turned  passion  into  tumult, 
but  already  in  each  case  the  train  was 
laid. 

IV 

Especially  easy  is  it  in  the  present  state  survival  of 
of  our  own  country  and  the  world  for  thefittest 
the  most  rudimentary  of  political  observ- 
ers to  realize  how  possible  it  is,  —  nay, 


64  POLITICS  AND  fflSTORY 

how  inevitable, — for  tremendous  political 
consequences  to  flow  from  books  and 
speculations  that  seem  to  have  nothing 
to  do  with  politics.  Who  can  measure 
the  influence  on  our  contemporary  policies 
of  Darwin  and  the  other  literature  of 
Survival  of  the  Fittest ;  and  not  only  on 
practical  politics,  but  its  decisive  con- 
tributory influence  upon  active  and  power- 
ful schools  of  written  history  ?  It  is  no 
mere  literary  whim  to  count  Darwin  and 
the  prestige  of  Prince  Bismarck,  as  twin 
factors  in  the  change  of  public  temper 
from  the  nineteenth  century  to  the 
twentieth.  On  the  other  hand,  we  should 
not  forget  how  this  passing  change  on  the 
great  theatre  of  states  and  government 
from  a  silver  to  a  bronze  age,  has  been 
accompanied  by  the  spread,  on  a  less 
resounding  stage,  of  an  intenser  humanity 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  65 

towards  children,  animals,  victims  of 
cruel  disease,  men  in  prisons,  black  men 
slaving  in  African  jungles,  and  all  else 
in  need  of  pity,  succour,  and  common 
human-heartedness.  It  has  not  all  been 
blood  and  iron,  nor  has  the  rigour  of 
political  or  social  logic  prevailed  un- 
qualified. So  complex,  subtle,  and  im- 
penetrable, are  the  filaments  that  se- 
cretly bind  men's  thoughts  and  moods 
together. 

As  with  books  and  principles,  so  with  The  ruler  as 
famous    actors    on    the    historic    stage.    *y ' 
When  Victor  Hugo  returned  from  exile 
some  forty  years  ago,   even  competent 
men  who  did  not  much  admire  either  him 
or  his  art,  felt  and  admitted  that  one 
whose  person  was  circled  by  the  enthu- 
siasm   of    three    generations,    must    be 
possessed  of  qualities  worthy  of  exalta- 


66  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

tion  and  honour.  Him,  they  said,  who 
knows  how  to  awaken  the  noblest  feelings 
and  impulses  in  men's  breasts,  whatever 
he  may  be  besides,  —  it  is  well  that  we 
should  honour ;  he  is  the  hearth  at  which 
the  soul  of  the  country  is  kindled  and 
kept  alive.  This  diffusion  of  warm,  lofty, 
and  stimulating  interests  may  be  better 
worth  the  critic's  attention  than  his 
book's  specific  content.  Hugo's  glory 
was  due  as  much  to  the  politician  as  to 
the  poet,  and  that  was  the  secret  of  an 
immense  renown,  only  to  be  compared 
with  Voltaire's;  with  both,  the  pen  was 
sword. 

what  does  It  was  said  to  a  great  English  states- 
man  °f  our  day>  "You  have  so  lived  and 
wrought  as  to  keep  the  soul  alive  in  Eng- 
land." This  is  something,  after  all,  apart 
from  the  clauses  of  his  Bills.  It  is  a 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  67 

something  that  may  be  almost  as  good 
as  everything.  To  leave  out  or  lessen 
personality  would  be  to  turn  the  record 
of  social  development  into  a  void.  The 
genius  of  Comte  produced  a  reasoned  list 
of  the  heroes  and  benefactors  of  mankind, 
of  which  it  has  been  justly  said  by  the 
most  eminent  opponent  of  Comte's  con- 
structive system,  that  a  more  compre- 
hensive and  catholic  sympathy  and  rev- 
erence towards  every  kind  of  service  to 
mankind  is  not  to  be  met  with  in  any 
other  thinker.1  A  calendar  without 
Luther,  Calvin,  or  Napoleon  needs  ex- 
planation, but  this  was  founded  on  his 
own  elaborated  and  peculiar  estimate  of 
positive  contribution  to  the  well-being  of 

1  The  list  is  to  be  found  in  admirable  form  in  the  volume 
edited  by  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison,  The  New  Calendar  of  Great 
Men,  Biographies  of  the  558  Worthies  of  all  Ages  and  Nations 
in  the  Positivist  Calendar.  (Macmillan,  1902.) 


68  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

human  society.  Each  is  connected  in 
place  and  work  with  the  other.  That  is 
a  very  different  thing  from  the  adoration 
of  cloud-compelling  giants.  It  is  very 
different,  too,  from  that  attachment  to 
the  name  and  person  of  a  teacher  and 
inspirer,  which  is  one  of  the  most  beauti- 
ful of  all  traits  in  human  character. 
Select  them  as  you  will,  in  whatever 
realm  of  thought,  action,  or  creation, 
whether  from  five  hundred  or  five,  the 
first  question,  and  in  one  sense  the  last, 
is,  What  does  your  hero  personify  ? 
Nothing,  we  may  be  sure,  is  more  fatal 
than  turning  history  into  idolatry.  The 
hero-worship  that  Carlyle's  wayward 
genius  made  so  popular  in  our  generation, 
too  easily  alike  in  history  and  in  politics, 
falsifies  perspective.  Unity  of  ideas  and 
interests,  it  is  true,  in  a  great  man  of 


POLITICS  AND   HISTORY  69 

lofty  plan  and  power  of  action,  affect 
our  imagination  with  something  of  the 
symmetry  and  attraction  of  the  grandest 
art  —  drama,  epic,  symphony,  the  figures 
in  the  Medicean  chapel,  the  Sis  tine 
frescoes.  But  the  standards  of  art  are 
bad  guides  in  choosing  political  heroes. 
Of  Napoleon  it  was  said  by  one  who 
knew,  that  he  was  all  imagination :  he 
created  an  imaginary  Spain,  an  imaginary 
England,  an  imaginary  Catholicism, 
imaginary  finance,  and  imaginary  France. 
And  Carlyle  in  time  created  an  imaginary 
Napoleon  for  hero-worship. 

Unwelcome    as    it  must  be   to   many   «Fortui- 
a  deep  prepossession,   we   may    as   well   ^J*^1 
realize  that  the  doctrine  of  "fortuitous   history, 
variation,"    in    which    speculation    finds 
the   key   to   new   species,    has    bearings 
beyond  biology.     The  commanding  man 


70  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

in  a  momentous  day  seems  only  to  be 
the  last  accident  in  a  series ;  the  unac- 
countable possessor  of  skill,  talent, 
genius,  will,  vision,  fitted  to  create  or  to 
control  emergencies,  or  to  make  revolu- 
tions in  both  the  machinery  and  com- 
modities of  life.  "After  all,"  said  Alexan- 
der I.  of  Russia  to  Madame  de  Stael,  "I 
am  only  a  happy  accident."  Military  his- 
tory shows  in  a  hundred  cases  some  odd 
turn  of  chance,  fortune,  wind  and  weather, 
unforeseen  and  unforeseeable,  on  a  given 
day  deciding  battle  or  campaign.  The 
greatest  generals  have  been  first  to  own 
the  blind  jeopardies  of  their  game,  the 
hazards  when  men  play  with  the  iron  dice 
of  war.  Last  accident  or  first,  —  states- 
man, captain,  thinker,  inventor,  —  the 
precipitating  agent  appears  fortuitous; 
comet,  not  great  fixed  star  —  the  acci- 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  71 

dent  of  a  peculiar  individuality  coinciding 
with  opportunity  or  demand. 

If  any  one  should  be  scandalized  by 
the  proposition  that  the  course  of  history 
can  be  deflected  by  an  accident,  or 
should  find  in  it  an  impious  flavour,  we 
should  remember  that  both  devout 
churchmen  and  deep  statesmen,  the 
loftiest  champions  of  adherence  to  the 
profoundest  pieties  of  life  and  time,  have 
been  the  first  and  most  constant  to  en- 
large upon  the  impenetrable  mysterious- 
ness  that  hangs  about  the  origin,  the 
course,  the  working  of  human  societies 
and  their  governing  institutions.  When 
the  Russian  Czar,  a  mystic  of  the  purest 
water,  called  himself  an  accident,  he 
meant  no  more  than  a  mystery,  a  power 
of  inscrutable  source.  Why  should  we 
be  more  shocked  at  the  fortuitous  in 


72  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

affairs  of  government,  than  in  the  appear- 
ance of  the  Bachs  and  Beethovens  in 
music,  or  Newton,  or  Watt,  or  any  other 
of  the  originating  luminaries  in  art,  or 
science,  or  productive  invention  ? 
The  Historic  Truly  has  it  been  said  of  the  historic 

Method.  111  • 

method,  that  among  other  of  its  vast 
influences,  it  reduces  the  element  of 
individual  accident  to  its  due  propor- 
tions; it  conceives  of  national  character 
and  national  circumstances  as  the  crea- 
tive forces  that  they  are.  An  ironical 
lawyer  assures  us  that  it  would  be  better 
to  be  convicted  of  petty  larceny  than  to 
be  found  wanting  in  "historic-minded- 
ness."  What  is  the  historic  method  ? 
Its  sway  is  now  universal  in  the  field  of 
social  judgment  and  investigation.  It 
warns  us  that  we  cannot  explain  or  under- 
stand, without  allowing  for  origins  and 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  73 

the  genetical  side  of  the  agents  and  con- 
ditions with  which  we  have  all  to  deal. 
It  substitutes  for  dogmas  deduced  from 
abstract  regions,  search  for  two  things. 
The  first,  the  correlation  of  leading  facts 
and  social  ideas  with  one  another  in  a 
given  community  at  a  given  time.  The 
second,  the  evolution  of  order  succeeding 
to  order  in  common  beliefs,  tastes,  cus- 
toms, diffusion  of  wealth,  laws,  and  all 
the  arts  of  life.  Stripped  of  formality, 
this  only  expands  the  familiar  truth  that 
laws  and  institutions  are  not  made  but 
grow,  and  what  is  true  of  them  is  true  of 
ideas,  language,  manners,  which  are  in 
effect  their  source  and  touchstone. 

It  is  easy  to  see  that  the  ascendancy  of 
the  historic  method  has  its  drawbacks. 
Study  of  all  the  successive  stages  in 
beliefs,  institutions,  laws,  forms  of  art, 


74  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

only  too  soon  grows  into  a  substitute 
for  direct  criticism  of  all  these  things 
upon  their  merits  and  in  themselves. 
Inquiry  what  the  event  actually  was, 
vital  and  indispensable  as  that  of  course 
must  be,  and  what  its  significance  and 
interpretation,  becomes  secondary  to 
inquiry  how  it  came  about.  Too  exclu- 
sive attention  to  dynamic  aspects, 
weakens  the  energetic  duties  of  the 
static.  More  than  one  school  thus  deem 
the  predominance  of  historic-minded- 
ness  excessive.  It  means,  they  truly 
say,  in  its  very  essence,  veto  of  the  abso- 
lute, persistent  substitution  of  the  rela- 
tive. Your  method  is  non-moral,  like 
any  other  scientific  instrument.  So  is 
Nature  in  one  sense,  red  in  tooth  and 
claw,  only  careful  for  survival  of  the 
strongest.  There  is  no  more  conscience 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  75 

in  your  comparative  history,  than  there 
is  in  comparative  anatomy.  You  arrange 
ideals  in  classes  and  series,  but  a  classified 
ideal  loses  its  vital  spark  and  halo. 
Every  page  abounds  in  ironies.  Even 
figures  of  high  mark  turn  out  political 
somnambulists.  Talk  of  "eternal  politi- 
cal truths,"  or  "first  principles  of  govern- 
ment," has  no  meaning.  Stated  sum- 
marily, is  not  your  history  one  pro- 
longed "becoming"  (fieri,  werderi),  an 
endless  sequence  of  action,  reaction,  gen- 
eration, destruction,  renovation,  "a  tale 
of  sound  and  fury  signifying  nothing." 
All  is  flux,  said  Heraclitus  long  centuries 
ago ;  no  man  goes  twice  down  the  same 
stream;  new  waters  are  in  constant 
flow ;  they  run  down,  they  gather  again ; 
all  is  overflow  and  fall.  Such  argument 
as  this,  I  know,  may  be  hard  pressed, 


science. 


76  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

and  it  is  in  truth  a  protest  for  the  absolute 
that  cannot  be  spared  to  many  active 
causes.  But  that  relative  tests  and 
standards  are  the  keys  both  to  real  knowl- 
edge of  history,  and  to  fair  measure  of  its 
actors,  is  a  doctrine  not  likely  to  lose  its 
hold. 

Politics  as  To-night  is  not  the  time  for  discussing 
whether  there  is  such  a  thing  as  political 
science.  I  need  not  try,  for  the  work 
has  been  incomparably  well  done  for  our 
purposes  in  Sir  Frederick  Pollock's  short 
volume  on  the  History  of  the  Science  of 
Politics.  Is  there  any  true  analogy 
between  the  body  politic  and  the  body 
natural;  are  the  methods  and  processes 
of  politics  to  be  brought  within  sight  of 
the  methods  and  processes  of  biology  ? 
The  politician  may  borrow  phrases  from 
the  biologist,  and  talk  of  embryos,  germs, 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  77 

organisms,  but  surely  those  are  right 
who  insist  that  we  have  not  come  near 
to  the  definite  creation  of  an  inductive 
political  science.1  That  is  certainly  no 
reason  why  the  politician  should  not 
reason,  nor  why  the  historian  should 
not  explore,  with  the  methodical  energy, 
caution,  conscience,  candour,  and  deter- 
mined love  of  truth,  that  marked  Darwin 
and  the  heroes  of  the  natural  sciences. 
Political  science  suffers  from  the  same 
defect  as  political  economy  in  the  earlier 
part  of  the  nineteenth  century.  There 
is  a  strange  rarefaction  in  its  atmosphere. 
The  abstract  political  man  wears  the 
same  artificial  character  as  the  abstract 
man  of  the  economist.  He  was  usually 
supposed  by  the  French  thinker  of  Vol- 
taire's day  to  dwell  in  China  or  Persia, 

1  Maitland,  Collected  Papers,  iii.  288. 


78  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

or  any  other  chosen  land  of  which,  as  it 
actually  was,  they  knew  nothing;  any 
more  than  they  knew  of  Canada  when 
they  ridiculed  the  war  between  England 
and  France  as  a  struggle  for  thousands  of 
square  miles  of  perpetual  snow.  We 
know  better  now,  but  the  standards  of 
human  motive  are  still  applied  in  arbi- 
trary fashion  to  what  is  distant  in  time 
or  place.  Ethical  considerations  pass 
for  so  much  ornament.  Matters  are 
too  much  confined  to  description  of 
political  mechanics,  without  regard  to 
all  the  varieties  of  social  fuel  on  which 
the  driving  force  depends.  The  chang- 
ing growth  of  new  opinion,  the  effective- 
ness of  political  institutions  in  giving 
expression  to  new  opinion,  are  treated 
as  secondary,  or  not  treated  at  all.  The 
lines  laid  down  by  Professor  Dicey,  in 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  79 

his  book  on  the  relation  between  law  and 
opinion  in  the  nineteenth  century,  deserve 
to  be  followed,  and  they  are  sure  to  be. 
The  science  so  conceived  will  realize 
that  the  value  of  political  forms  is  to  be 
measured  by  what  they  do.  They  must 
express  and  answer  the  mind  and  pur- 
poses of  a  State,  in  their  amplest  bear- 
ings. I  hope  all  this  is  not  ungrateful  to  a 
group  of  writers  in  this  country,  who  in 
the  last  few  years  have  filled  a  really 
important  bookshelf  in  any  library  pre- 
tending to  be  on  the  highest  level  in  this 
truly  important  sphere  —  with  Green, 
Pollock,  Dicey,  Hobhouse,  Bosanquet, 
Wallas,  among  them.  Let  nobody  sup- 
pose that  speculations  as  to  the  State 
and  its  various  relations  to  the  Individ- 
ual are  immaterial.  It  is  held  that  the 
attempts  of  certain  French  teachers  to 


80  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

present  German  theories  of  the  State 
in  French  dress,  are  directly  responsible 
for  Syndicalism  in  France. 

Politics  Politics,  in  the  sense  that  I  am  sug- 

gesting, are  different  from  law,  because 
law  tends  to  stereotype  thought  by  forc- 
ing it  into  fixed  categories,  but  political 
science,  rightly  handled,  is  for  ever 
reopening  these  categories,  to  examine 
how  they  answer  to  contemporary  facts. 
Political  science  is  wider  than  law,  be- 
cause its  work  may  be  said  to  begin  where 
law  ends.  It  is  less  wide  than  sociology, 
because  it  starts  from  the  assumption 
of  the  State  with  all  its  rights,  powers, 
and  duties. 

v 

A  good  Germans   have   in    Weltanschauung   a 

word.  word  for  which  I  know  of  no  English 

equivalent.     The  French  find  no  easier 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  81 

than  do  we,  to  convey  it  in  a  single  word 
or  even  in  a  free  circumlocution.  It 
comes  of  the  questions  that  haunt  all 
ages,  that  survive  all  philosophies,  that 
defy  continuous  generations  of  chartered 
soothsayers,  that  mock  rising  and  sinking 
schools  alike.  Our  literature  possesses 
at  least  one  poetic  presentation  of  its 
spirit,  in  the  two  or  three  pages  of  inspir- 
ing prose  that  are  the  proem  to  George 
Eliot's  Romola.  Technically  meaning  a 
conception  of  the  universe,  Weltan- 
schauung covers  a  man's  outlook  upon 
the  world  and  time  and  human  destinies ; 
the  mental  summary  of  experience, 
knowledge,  duty,  affections  to  his  fellows  ; 
relations  to  mysterious  Force  and  Will, 
call  it  Providence,  Moira,  Fate,  or  by 
what  name  we  choose,  invisible  but 
supreme.  Such  an  outlook  on  the  world 


82  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

and  its  meanings,  varies  with  each  his- 
toric age,  and  marks  it  for  what  it  is. 
This  is  what,  if  we  seek  the  roots  of  social 
existence,  distinguishes  one  period  of 
civilization  from  another.  Men  in 
general  are  but  vaguely  conscious  of 
Weltanschauung.  For  them,  the  World, 
in  this  wide  comprehension  of  that  com- 
monest and  most  fluid  of  all  our  daily 
words,  is  no  object  of  their  thoughts. 
Yet  all  the  time  in  some  established  creed, 
consecrated  form,  or  iron  chain  of  silent 
habit,  this  is  what  fixes  vision,  moulds 
judgment,  inspires  purpose,  limits  acts, 
gives  its  shades,  colour,  and  texture  to 
common  language.  Even  for  superior 
natures,  narrow  are  the  windows  of  the 
mind ;  no  wide  champaign,  but  narrow 
and  restricted  are  the  confines  of  our 
landscape. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  83 

History,  in  the  great  conception  of  it,  Range  of 
has  often  been  compared  to  a  mountain 
chain  seen  far  off  in  a  clear  sky,  where 
the  peaks  seem  linked  to  one  another 
towards  the  higher  crest  of  the  group. 
An  ingenious  and  learned  writer  the 
other  day  amplified  this  famous  image, 
by  speaking  of  a  set  of  volcanic  islands 
heaving  themselves  out  of  the  sea,  at 
such  angles  and  distances  that  only  to 
the  eye  of  a  bird,  and  not  to  a  sailor 
cruising  among  them,  would  they  appear 
as  the  heights  of  one  and  the  same  sub- 
merged range.  The  sailor  is  the  politi- 
cian. The  historian,  without  prejudice 
to  monographic  exploration  in  interven- 
ing valleys  and  ascending  slopes,  will 
covet  the  vision  of  the  bird. 

According    to    an    instructive    living 
scholar,  here  we  come  upon  the  great 


84  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

contrast  between  ancient  history  and 
modern.  For  right  comprehension  of 
Thucydides,  he  says,  "the  fundamental 
conception  which  all  our  thought  about 
the  world  implies,  must  be  banished  - 
the  conception,  namely,  that  the  whole 
course  of  events  of  every  kind,  human 
or  non-human,  is  one  enormous  con- 
catenation of  causes  and  effects  stretch- 
ing forward  and  back  into  infinite  time, 
and  spreading  outwards  over  immeasur- 
able space.  The  world  on  which  the 
Greek  looked  out,  presented  no  such 
spectacle  as  this.  Human  affairs  —  the 
subject-matter  of  history  -  -  were  not  to 
him  a  single  strand  in  the  illimitable  web 
of  natural  evolution ;  their  course  was 
shaped  solely  by  one  or  both  of  two 
factors :  immediate  human  motives,  and 
the  will  of  gods  and  spirits,  of  Fortune  or 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  85 

of  Fate." *  All  this  is  just  as  true  of 
great  political  historians  like  Machiavel 
and  Guicciardini ;  they  looked  out  upon 
the  Europe  of  the  fifteenth  century  from 
the  walls  of  Florence  with  Livy,  Tacitus, 
Sallust,  for  their  only  models.  They 
had  the  experience  of  intelligent  travel, 
no  doubt,  and  that  is  the  best  of  sub- 
stitutes for  patterns  of  written  history. 
£>till  the  mighty  commander  of  a  later 
age,  himself  Italian  in  stock,  declared 
that  Machiavelli  wrote  about  battles  as  a 
blind  man  might  write  about  colours. 
So  we  might  proceed  through  the 
"enormous  concatenation"  of  historical 
names  and  sweeping  change,  that  was 
never  conceived  nor  comprehensible  until 
it  came  to  pass.  Think,  for  example, 

1  Thucydides  Mythistoricus,  by   F.   M.   Cornford   (1907), 
pp.  66-68. 


86  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

of  the  strange  new  spectacle  of  world 
and  life  that  opened  to  men's  minds  and 
shaped  their  days,  after  the  spiritual 
struggle  between  Catholic  and  Protestant 
confessions.  Heresies  had  been  abundant 
during  the  Ages  of  Faith,  but  wide  dis- 
turbance of  simple  unquestioning  accept- 
ance had  been  rare  and  superficial.  The 
protracted  battle  over  the  authority  of 
Rome,  over  toleration,  over  church  gov- 
ernment by  bishops,  over  rite  and  sym- 
bol, had  been  fought  out.  The  rival 
creeds  identified  themselves  with  politi- 
cal forces,  and  had  become  definite  and 
commanding  ingredients  in  organized 
States.  Only  then  did  the  purple  vision 
of  human  societies  in  western  Europe, 
united  by  a  universal  faith,  begin  to  fade. 
The  standing  conflict  that  henceforth 
divided  Christianity,  and  divided  and 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  87 

subdivided  Protestantism  itself,  by  the 
mere  fact  of  its  existence  as  a  conflict, 
apart  from  its  merits  and  contents, 
extended,  diverted,  transformed  the  out- 
look. Old  worlds  and  systems  disappear, 
new  arise,  still  men  live  but  in  a  corner  of 
their  own. 

The  temper  of  our  present  time  is  The  day  of 
adverse  to  generalization.  Harnack  says 
that  in  1700  the  most  universal  or  ency- 
clopaedic mind  was  Leibnitz,  and  in 
1800  it  was  Goethe.  I  suppose  Leonardo 
da  Vinci  for  1500,  and  nobody  would 
dispute  that  in  1600  it  was  Bacon  —  the 
greatest  intellect  that  ever  combined 
power  in  thought  with  responsible  prac- 
tice in  affairs  of  state.  Court  affairs  at 
Weimar  were  little  more  than  playground 
politics.  To  whom  would  competent 
authorities  give  the  palm  in  1900  ?  If 


88  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

we  are  slow  to  answer,  the  reason  is  that 
advance  of  specialization  over  the  whole 
field  of  knowledge  has  made  the  ency- 
clopaedic mind  an  anachronism.  The 
day  of  the  circumnavigator  is  over  - 
the  men  who  strive  to  round  the  whole 
sphere  of  mind,  to  complete  the  circuit 
of  thought  and  knowledge,  and  to  touch 
at  all  the  ports.  We  may  find  comfort 
in  the  truth  that  though  excess  of 
specialization  is  bad,  to  make  sciolism 
into  a  system  is  worse.  In  reading  his- 
tory it  is  our  common  fault  to  take  too 
short  measure  of  the  event,  to  mistake 
some  early  scene  in  the  play  as  if  it  were 
the  fifth  act,  and  so  conceive  the  plot 
all  amiss.  The  event  is  only  compre- 
hended in  its  fullest  dimensions,  and  for 
that  the  historic  recorder,  like  or  unlike 
the  actor  before  him,  needs  insight  and 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  89 

imagination.  French  Revolution  from 
Fall  of  the  Bastille  to  Waterloo ;  English 
Revolution  from  Eliot,  Pym,  Hampden, 
Oliver,  to  Naseby,  and  from  Naseby  to 
William  and  Mary;  American  Union 
from  the  Philadelphia  State  House  in 
1776,  to  the  Appomattox  Court  House 
in  1865 ;  Democratic  Ordering  in  Eng- 
land from  the  Reform  Act  of  1832  to  the 
Parliament  Act  in  1911 ;  Ireland  from 
the  enfranchisement  of  the  Roman 
Catholics  in  1793  —  to  some  date  still 
uncertain.  How  desperately  chimerical 
would  the  end  of  all  these  immense  trans- 
actions have  seemed  to  men  who  across 
long  tracts  of  time  had  started  them. 
They  are  all  political ;  but  the  same  obser- 
vation would  be  just  as  true  of  the  world's 
march  in  the  sphere  of  ideas,  methods, 
moral  standards,  religious  creeds. 


90  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

From  All  agree  that  we  have  no  business  to 

tapestries 
to  serge. 


seek  more  from  the  past  than  the  very 


past  itself.  Nobody  disputes  with  Cicero 
when  he  asks,  "Who  does  not  know  that 
it  is  the  first  law  of  history,  not  to  dare 
a  word  that  is  false  ?  Next  not  to  shrink 
from  a  word  that  is  true.  No  partiality, 
no  grudge."1  Though  nobody  disputes 
the  obvious  answers,  have  a  majority  of 
historical  practitioners  complied  ?  To- 
day taste  and  fashion  have  for  a  season 
turned  away  from  the  imposing  tapestries 
of  the  literary  historian,  in  favour  of  the 
drab  serge  of  research  among  diplomatic 
archives,  parish  registers,  private  muni- 
ments, and  everything  else  so  long  as  it 
is  not  print.  As  Acton  put  it,  the  great 
historian  now  takes  his  meals  in  the 
kitchen.  Even  here  we  are  not  quite 

» De  Oral.  ii.  15. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  91 

at  our  ease.  Bismarck,  reading  a  book 
of  superior  calibre,  once  came  upon  a 
portrait  of  an  eminent  personage  whom 
he  had  known  well.  Such  a  man  as  is 
described  here,  he  cried,  never  existed ; 
and  he  went  on  in  graphic  strokes  to 
paint  the  sitter  as  he  had  actually  found 
him.  "It  is  not  in  diplomatic  materials, 
but  in  their  life  of  every  day  that  you 
come  to  know  men."  So  does  a  singu- 
larly good  judge  warn  us  of  the  perils  of 
archivial  research.  Nor  can  we  forget 
the  lament  of  the  most  learned  and 
laborious  of  all  English  historians  of  our 
time.  "I  am  beginning  to  think,"  said 
Freeman,  "that  there  is  not,  and  never 
was  any  such  thing  as  truth  in  the  world. 
At  least  I  don't  believe  that  any  two 
people  ever  give  exactly  the  same  ac- 
count of  anything,  even  when  they  have 


92  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

seen  it  with  their  own  eyes,  except  when 
they  copy  from  one  another."  l  This  is 
to  bring  some  support  for  Goethe,  that 
"the  only  form  of  truth  is  poetry." 
The  plethora  of  printed  books,  moreover, 
has  troubles  of  its  own ;  it  is  consolatory 
to  find  an  indefatigable  historic  worker 
in  Oxford  to-day,  allowing  for  the  weak- 
ness of  the  flesh,  and  protesting  that 
bibliographies  are  sometimes  so  enormous 
as  to  be  rather  a  nuisance  than  a  help, 
unity  of  The  unity  of  history  is  now  orthodox 

doctrine,  though  accepted,  as  orthodox 
doctrines  sometimes  are,  in  various  senses. 
Freeman  protested  with  almost  tiresome 
iteration  against  division  between  ancient 
history  and  modern,  and  summed  up  in 
the  heroic  assurance  that  history  deals 
not  with  the  rivalry,  "but  the  brother- 

1  Life  and  Letters,  \.  238. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  93 

hood  of  all  periods  and  all  subjects,  of 
all  nations  and  languages,  at  least  within 
the  pale  of  Aryan  Europe."  Acton  put 
it  that  "History  derives  its  best  virtue 
from  regions  beyond  the  sphere  of  State." 
Mr.  Gooch,  a  younger  student,  says  more 
fully:  "No  .presentation  of  history  can 
be  adequate  which  neglects  the  growths 
of  the  religious  consciousness,  of  litera- 
ture, of  the  moral  and  physical  sciences, 
of  art,  of  scholarship,  of  social  life."  A 
third  view  is  that  profitable  knowledge  of 
history  consists  less  in  remembering 
events  or  characters  of  statesmen,  than 
in  knowing  what  men  were  like  in  bygone 
days,  their  aims,  hopes,  pleasures,  beliefs, 
and  how  they  thought  and  felt.  There 
can  be  little  doubt  that  this  would  best 
hit  the  common  taste.  Treitschke  will 
not  have  it  so.  The  farther  a  man 


94  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

places  himself  away  from  the  State,  as 
he  maintains,  the  farther  he  goes  from 
historic  life.  To  bring  descriptions  of 
the  soul  of  a  people  into  history,  is  to 
deal  with  last  year's  snow.  Who,  he 
asks,  does  not  feel  Culturgeschichte  im- 
perfect and  unsatisfying,  even  when 
handled  by  a  master  ?  Even  in  Burck- 
hardt's  famous  book  on  the  Italian  Re- 
naissance, who  does  not  feel  a  want,  the 
want  of  active  personalities  ?  History, 
as  Treitschke  contends,  is  first  of  all  the 
presentation  of  res  gestae,  and  of  active 
statesmen.  The  essential  things  in  the 
statesman  are  strength  of  will,  courage, 
massive  ambition,  passionate  joy  in  the 
result. 

It  needs  no  wizard  to  see  how  such 
doctrine  as  this  lends  a  hand  to  the  sinis- 
ter school  of  political  historians,  who 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  95 

insist  that  the  event  is  its  own  justifica- 
tion. Force  and  Right  are  one.  Fact 
and  reason,  they  contend,  are  and  must 
be  one  and  the  same :  the  real  and  the 
rational  are  identic,  and  it  is  waste  of 
time  to  labour  differences  between  them. 
The  disciples  are  thus  led  on  to  that 
exaltation  of  the  State,  which  stands  for 
force,  into  supreme  pre-eminence  as  mas- 
ter-conception in  men's  minds  and  habits. 
Of  this  strong  meat,  you  will  let  me  say 
something  later. 

I  have  just  quoted  words  about  reli-  churches 

i  •  i  i    as  political 

gious  consciousness,  and  regions  beyond  realities. 
the  sphere  of  State.  How  constantly 
have  the  immense  phenomena  of 
churches,  Catholic  and  Protestant,  so 
imposing  and  so  penetrating,  made  the 
gravest  chapter  in  the  history  of  States. 
As  if  Churches  were  not  political  realities. 


96  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

As  if  the  Council  of  Constance  in  the 
fifteenth  century,  the  Council  of  Trent 
in  the  sixteenth,  the  Assembly  of  Divines 
in  the  Jerusalem  Chamber  at  West- 
minster during  the  civil  wars,  the  Four 
Declarations  of  the  French  clergy  in 
1682,  —  with  all  the  array  of  pontiffs, 
church  princes,  saints,  doctors,  congrega- 
tions, presbyteries,  preachers,  friars,  in- 
quisitors, missioners,  creeds,  symbols, 
bulls,  canon  laws,  catechisms, -- were 
not  in  truth  the  very  essence  and  main- 
spring of  the  vast  and  subtle  political 
commotions  that  for  age  after  age  fol- 
lowed in  their  perpetual  train.  Is  it 
mere  distortion  to  say  that  "hardly  a 
more  momentous  resolution  can  be  found 
in  history"  than  the  decision  at  Nicsea 
in  the  fourth  century  ?  1  If  it  be  right  to 

1  Gwatkin's  Studies  of  Arianism,  43. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  97 

judge  that  no  false  system  ever  struck 
more  directly  at  the  very  life  of  Chris- 
tianity than  Arianism,  then  the  pro- 
scription of  Arius  and  the  triumph  of 
Athanasius  was  an  infinitely  more  potent 
thing  in  the  history  of  Western  mankind, 
than  the  fall  of  the  Bastille  and  all  the 
principles  of  either  French  or  American 
Revolution. 

It  may,  if  anybody  likes  to  have  it  so, 
be  a  good  distinction  that  Force  is  the 
principle  of  the  State,  while  the  life  and 
principle  of  a  Church  is  Belief.  For  that 
matter  both  Church  and  State  rest  alike 
upon  a  shifting  Tertium  Quid  of  Author- 
ity, —  say,  an  infallible  Pope  or  an  im- 
pregnable Book.  The  political  affinities 
of  religious  and  ecclesiastic  creeds  offer 
to  the  historic  student  some  of  his  stand- 
ing puzzles.  How  comes  it,  for  example, 


98  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

that  the  fatalism  implied  in  Calvinistic 
Protestantism  has  been  the  nurse  of 
some  of  the  most  strenuous,  active, 
energetic,  and  independent  natures  in 
political  history  ?  There  is  many  another 
case  of  national  temper  and  outward 
circumstance  bearing  down  the  most 
stringent  of  logical  arguments. 
Political  Our  own  day  offers  a  singular  kaleido- 

scope. Men  thought  it  a  crushing 
scandal  in  the  sixteenth  century  when 
Francis  I.  was  suspected  of  making  terms 
for  himself  with  the  arch  enemy  of  Chris- 
tian mankind,  the  Khalif  of  Turkey. 
Richelieu,  one  of  the  half-dozen  sovereign 
names  in  the  European  record,  system- 
atically worked  with  English  and  Dutch 
against  popish  Spain  for  the  same  reason 
that  made  him  relentless  against  his  own 
Huguenots,  namely,  that  they  were  the 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  99 

foes  of  monarchical  unity  in  France. 
The  paradox  is  not  absent  in  our  own 
time.  We  see  Roman  Catholic  Austro- 
Hungary  the  pledged  confederate  of 
what  we  are  assured  by  her  own  oracles 
is  Protestant  Prussia.  One-third  of 
Prussia,  to  be  sure,  is  Catholic,  but 
Catholicism  in  standing  contact  with 
Protestant  culture  and  liberalized  in- 
stitutions, as  the  American  Union  and 
our  own  Quebec  are  enough  to  show,  is 
not  like  the  same  communion  in  Latin 
systems.  Then  the  Sovereign  who  is 
head  of  the  Church  of  England,  is  the 
ally  of  non-Christian  Japan.  The  King- 
Emperor  of  India  —  the  first  European 
ruler  who  has  ever  put  on  the  crown  in 
Asia  —  is  neutral  and  indifferent  to  the 
faiths  and  nearly  all  the  old  consecrated 
practices  of  the  myriads  of  Hindus, 


100  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

Mahommedans,  Parsees.  Politics  are  ad- 
mittedly as  if  from  the  necessity  of  the 
thing,  or  privately  for  the  sake  of  decency, 
supreme;  and,  it  may  be,  whether  men 
wish  the  process  well  or  ill,  such  events 
do  more  to  dissolve  dogma  and  sap  its 
hold,  than  any  number  of  infidel  books. 
Religion  as  Sympathy,  again,  in  principles  of  gov- 

cause  and  j     t  t 

pretext  ernment  and  forms  of  government,  is 
treated  as  no  more  to  the  point  in  settling 
the  friendship  of  States,  than  sympathy 
in  theology.  The  balance  of  power  is 
supposed  just  now  in  the  diplomatic 
chanceries  to  be  maintained  in  Europe, 
by  firm  co-operation  between  a  secu- 
larized Republic  in  France,  and  an 
absolutist  Monarchy  that  is  half  theoc- 
racy in  Russia.  Ecclesiastical  historians 
themselves  have  taught  us  how  constantly 
church  machinery  has  been  used  as  a 


POLITICS  AND   HISTORY  101 

source  of  power  for  the  statesman's 
objects.  They  point  to  the  war  against 
the  Albigensians  as  having  for  its  real 
purpose  the  strengthening  of  French 
monarchy ;  the  persecutions  in  Bohemia, 
as  designed  to  fortify  German  dominion 
over  the  Czechs ;  the  Spanish  Inquisi- 
tion, as  set  up  and  worked  to  overcome 
the  disunion  of  race  and  history,  for  the 
sake  of  the  Spanish  monarchy.  In  these 
and  an  untold  host  of  other  cases  the 
State  was  Force,  and  Belief  was  not  the 
only  point.  If  we  must  quantify,  it 
has  been  said  of  the  long  religious  wars 
in  France,  that  in  one-fifth  of  them 
religion  was  the  cause,  in  four-fifths  it 
was  only  the  pretext.  To  search  for 
the  secular  politician  behind  an  army  of 
spiritual  crusaders  is  no  cynicism.  The 
enthusiasm,  no  doubt,  is  the  more  attrac- 


102  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

live  and  exciting  to  reflective  minds. 
Yet  policy,  hidden  or  avowed,  may  be  a 
master-key. 

History  and  According  to  some  scientific  historians * 
with  a  right  to  speak,  history  does  not 
solve  questions ;  it  teaches  us  to  examine. 
We  often  hear  that  our  understanding  of 
history  is  spoiled  by  knowledge  of  the 
event.  A  great  event,  they  say,  is  sel- 
dom fully  understood  by  those  who 
worked  for  it.  Our  vision  is  surer  about 
the  past ;  there  we  have  the  whole ;  we 
see  the  beginning  and  the  end ;  we  dis- 
tinguish essential  from  accessory;  time 
foreshortens.  To  contemporaries  events 
are  confused,  obscured  by  passing 
accidents,  mixed  with  all  sorts  of  foreign 
elements.  Even  men  of  the  compass  of 

1  For  instance,  Fustel  de  Coulanges,  Questions  Historiques, 
Preface  (1893). 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  103 

Caesar,  William  the  Silent,  Cromwell, 
Chatham,  pursued  resolute  general  aims, 
subject  only  like  all  men's  aims  to  the 
uncounted  traverses  of  fortune,  and  to 
"leadings"  that  were  half  out  of  sight. 
Both  contemporaries  and  historians, 
more  often  than  they  suppose,  miss  a 
vital  point,  because  they  do  not  know  the 
intuitive  instinct  that  often  goes  farther 
in  the  statesman's  mind  than  deliberate 
analysis  or  argument.  A  visitor  of  Bis- 
marck's once  reminded  him  that  Scho- 
penhauer used  to  sit  with  him  at  dinner 
every  day  in  the  hotel  at  Frankfurt. 
"No,  I  had  no  business  with  him,  I  had 
neither  time  nor  inclination  for  philos- 
ophy," said  Bismarck,  "and  I  know 
nothing  of  Schopenhauer's  system."  It 
was  summarily  explained  to  him  as  vest- 
ing the  primacy  of  the  will  in  self-con- 


104  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

sciousness.  "I  daresay  that  may  be  all 
right,"  he  said;  "for  myself  at  least,  I 
have  often  noticed  that  my  will  had 
decided,  before  my  thinking  was 
finished."1  Improvisation  has  far  more 
to  do  in  politics  than  historians  or  other 
people  think. 

Dubious  History's   direct   lessons   are   few,   its 

historic  specific  morals  rare.  To  say  this  is  not 
parallels.  j.Q  disparage  the  grand  inspiration  that 
present  may  draw  from  past,  or  the  price- 
less value  of  old  examples  of  lofty  public 
deeds  and  magnanimous  men.  Plu- 
tarch's Lives,  parallels  and  all,  are  the 
master  proof,  one  of  the  too  few  books 
that  can  never  be  out  of  date.  Heine 
said  that  when  he  read  Plutarch,  he  felt 
a  vehement  impulse  instantly  to  take 
post-horses  for  Berlin,  and  turn  a  hero. 

1  Lebenserinnerungen  von  Julius  v.  Eckhardt,  ii.  122-8. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  105 

This,  however,  is  a  very  different  ques- 
tion. It  is  to  working  statesmen  that 
parallels  may  easily  be  a  snare,  and 
ludicrous  misapplications  from  Greece 
and  Rome  inspired  some  of  the  worst 
aberrations  both  of  the  French  Revolu- 
tion and  of  the  Empire.  The  Old  Testa- 
ment was  often  made  to  play  the  same 
part  in  our  own  Rebellion.  They  are 
convenient  to  the  politician.  A  plausible 
parallel  makes  him  feel  surer  of  his 
ground.  It  is  as  refreshing  as  a  broad 
reflective  digression  in  a  close  narrative. 
The  French  Revolution  is  down  to  this 
day  a  favourite  armoury  for  parallels, 
predictions,  warnings,  even  nicknames ; 
and  a  harmless  English  politician  finds 
himself  labelled  Jacobin  or  Girondin, 
though  he  really  has  no  more  in  common 
with  the  Frenchman  than  he  has  with 


106  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

Adam  or  Noah.  We  may  often  think  of 
Napoleon's  dictum,  that  "there  will  be 
no  real  peace  in  history,  till  the  whole 
generation  contemporary  with  the  French 
Revolution  is  extinct  to  the  very  last 
man,"  and  even  later.  Mr.  Bryce  holds 
that  though  usually  interesting,  and  often 
illuminating,  what  are  called  historian's 
parallels,  are  often  misleading.  He  tells 
how,  during  the  great  dispute  in  1876 
after  the  Bulgarian  massacres,  between 
those  who  thought  we  ought  to  back  the 
Sultan,  and  those  who  were  equally 
convinced  the  other  way,  he  met  one  day 
in  the  street  an  eminent  historical  pro- 
fessor, who  was  fond  of  descanting  on  the 
value  of  history  as  a  guide  to  politics. 
They  talked  of  the  crisis  in  the  East. 
"  I  said  '  Here  is  a  fine  opportunity  for 
applying  your  doctrines.  Party  politi- 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  107 

cians  may  be  divided,  but  no  student  of 
history  can  doubt  which  is  the  right 
course  for  the  Government  to  follow 
towards  Russia  and  the  Turks.'  'Cer- 
tainly,' he  replied,  'the  teachings  of 
history  are  plain.'  'You  mean,  of 
course,'  I  said,  scenting  some  signs  of 
disagreement,  '  that  we  ought  to  warn  the 
Sultan  that  he  is  wholly  in  the  wrong, 
and  can  have  no  support  from  us.' 
'No,  indeed,'  rejoined  my  friend,  'I 
mean  just  the  opposite." 

In  truth,  say  what  we  will  of  the  unity 
of  history  and  the  identity  in  the  ele- 
ments of  human  nature,  the  general 
body  of  two  political  cases  is  never 
exactly  the  same.  Nations  are  not  the  National 

,  i      .       .  •,       -,  .  -,  .-i      •      ideals  never 

same,  their  ideals  are  wide  apart,  their  thesame. 
standing  aims    and    preoccupations   are 
different.     It  is   inconceivable   to   Eng- 


108  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

lishmen  and  Germans  and  especially 
Scotsmen,  most  idealist  of  all,  that  men 
should  not  care  for  great  industrial  enter- 
prises, persistent  experiment,  wide  mer- 
cantile adventure.  They  reproach  the 
Latin  countries  with  lack  of  energy,  and 
cannot  understand  a  French  writer  who 
says  there  is  a  commercial  industry  and 
prosperity  that  his  countrymen  do  not 
envy,  and  actually  suggests  that  those 
who  are  alarmed,  should  ask  themselves 
whether,  after  all,  poverty  may  not  be 
for  nations,  what  it  has  so  often  been  for 
individuals,  the  mark  of  the  elect.1  So 
true  is  it  that  in  more  senses  than  one 
nations  do  not  use  the  same  language. 
And  what  is  true  of  nations,  applies  just 
as  aptly  to  historic  periods. 

A    good-natured    international    smile 

1  Sabatier,  V Orientation  relig.  de  la  France,  p.  166. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  109 

may  be  forgiven  at  the  ingenious  paral- 
lel discovered  by  a  learned  historian  of 
Hellenism,1  between  Macedonia  in  the 
days  of  Alexander  the  Great,  and  Prussia 
in  the  time  of  Prince  Bismarck.  The 
Greeks,  it  seems,  mastered  by  the  spirit 
of  the  canton  and  the  city-state,  thought 
nothing  of  their  land  as  a  whole,  until  a 
barbarian  from  the  north  perceived  it, 
made  "the  synthesis  of  their  civilization," 
and  spread  it  over  the  world ;  whereas  if 
Demosthenes  had  won  the  battle,  a 
desperate  state  of  things  would  have 
survived.  So  if  Sadowa  and  Sedan  had 
gone  amiss,  the  resplendent  orb  of  Ger- 
man radiance  and  intellectual  power 
would  never  have  broken  through  the 
nebulous  skies  of  a  disunited  fatherland, 

1  Droysen,  as  cited  in  Guilland's  L'Allemagne  Nouvelle  et  sea 
Historiens,p.  191. 


110 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 


Germany 
and  France 
as  rival 
civilizing 
forces. 


and  diffused  its  beams  over  the  civilized 
world.  The  same  singular  parallel  finds 
still  more  emphatic  expression  in  that 
admirable  man  and  historic  thinker, 
Dollinger.  For  once  forgetting  the  serene 
truth  that  sovereign  gifts  of  thought, 
imagination,  discovery  have  not  been 
quite  unequally  distributed  among  the 
modern  nations  of  the  Western  world, 
Dollinger  with  strange  excess  of  em- 
phasis insists  that  Germany  is  the 
intellectual  centre  from  which  proceed 
the  great  ideas  that  sway  the  world. 
She  attracts  all  thought  within  her 
scope,  shapes  it,  and  sends  it  forth  into 
the  universe  clothed  with  a  power  that  is 
her  own.  No  other  nation,  he  proceeds, 
can  approach  the  German  people  in 
many-sidedness ;  no  other  possesses  in 
so  great  a  measure,  side  by  side  with  this 


POLITICS  AND   HISTORY  HI 

power  of  adaptation,  the  qualities  of 
untiring  research  and  original  creative 
genius.  Out  of  all  the  nations  of  the 
modern  world,  the  German  people  are 
most  "like  the  Greeks  of  old."  They 
"have  been  called  to  an  intellectual 
priesthood,  and  to  this  high  vocation  they 
have  done  no  dishonour." 1  Greeks  or 
not,  nobody  will  deny  the  magnificence 
of  German  contribution,  though  much  of 
that  grand  contribution  in  Germany,  as 
in  Greece,  is  due  to  small  States.  And 
can  we  escape  an  ironic  start  after  all 
this,  on  encountering  the  proposition 
that  "vanity  is  the  accepted  characteris- 
tic of  the  French  nation"?  The  force 
of  the  Macedonian  parallel,  whatever  it 
amounts  to,  is  weakened,  if  it  is  not 
shattered,  by  Mill's  broad  declaration 

1  Conversations  of  Dr.  Dollinger,  Eng.  Trans.  (1892),  p.  205. 


112  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

that  the  ascendancy  of  a  ruder  civiliza- 
tion, and  the  subjection  by  brute  strength 
of  a  superior  civilization,  is  sheer  mis- 
chief to  the  human  race,  and  one  that 
civilized  humanity  with  one  accord  should 
rise  in  arms  to  prevent.  The  absorption 
of  Greece  by  Macedonia,  he  says,  was 
one  of  the  greatest  misfortunes  that  ever 
happened  to  the  world.1  So  harshly 
may  illustrious  philosophic  oracles  fall 
out  of  tune. 

Goethe  on         Leaving  ancient  history  aside,  I  can- 
recah*  the  Macedonian  Goethe's 


generous  recognition  of  his  debt  to  the 
supposed  Graeculi  of  France;  how  he 
delighted  in  Diderot,  and  even  translated 
one  of  his  famous  dialogues,  usually 
found  far  too  broad  and  tatterdemalion 
for  English  taste;  how  he  admired  the 

1  Representative  Government,  chap.  xvi. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  113 

tone  of  good  manners  in  French  transla- 
tion of  his  own  books,  due,  as  he  sup- 
poses, to  their  habit  of  thinking  and 
speaking  for  a  great  public,  whereas  in 
Germany,  he  says,  "the  writer  speaks  as 
if  he  were  alone,  and  you  only  hear  a 
single  voice."  In  other  words,  French 
literature  —  and  literature,  we  should 
remember,  differs  from  Science  as  it  does 
from  Music  —  is  so  essentially  sociable. 
We  know  its  masters  in  the  seventeenth 
century  —  Pascal,  La  Fontaine,  Moliere, 
Bossuet,  Fenelon,  de  Sevigne,  La  Bruyere, 
Saint  Simon.  We  know  the  writers  who 
stand  for  main  currents  in  the  eighteenth 
-  Bayle,  Montesquieu,  Voltaire,  Ency- 
clopaedists, Rousseau.  In  the  nineteenth, 
without  ignoring  the  fame  of  Goethe, 
Schiller,  Heine,  the  French  are  not  with- 
out some  reason  for  the  vanity  that  is 


114  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

imputed  to  them.  French  writers  con- 
spicuously engaged  the  attention  of  man- 
kind. They  turned  thought  and  interest 
and  curiosity  and  search  for  intellectual 
pleasure  into  new  channels.  They  led 
the  great  changes  in  mood,  standard,  and 
point  of  view  during  the  three  generations 
after  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  and  typified 
ideals  of  an  active  and  aspiring  age. 
De  Maistre  Proudhon,  Saint  Simon  (not 
the  famous  journalist  of  Versailles,  but 
the  earliest  name  in  the  socialistic  fer- 
ment a  hundred  years  ago),  and  Comte, 
unapproached  by  any  of  them  in  the 
power,  originality,  and  intellectual 
resource  with  which  he  wove  together 
the  strands  of  knowledge  into  the  web 
of  social  duty  —  were  all  effective  writers 
as  well  as  fresh  thinkers.  There  was 
Guizot,  founder  of  new  historic  schools, 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  115 

and  one  of  those  who  by  force  of  per- 
sonality apart  from  literary  contribution 
exercise  a  potent  influence  on  their  time. 
Renan  brought  wide  learning  and  infinite 
fascination  of  form  to  a  theological  dis- 
solution that  science,  and  the  widening 
of  men's  minds  by  the  widening  of  the 
known  world,  made  so  inevitable.  Victor 
Hugo,  amid  a  thousand  colossal  extrava- 
gances, sounded  to  an  enormous  public 
all  over  the  world  a  rolling  thunderblast 
against  the  barbarities  of  recorded  time, 
and  was  inspired  by  a  glorious  muse,  the 
genius  of  Pity.  It  would  be  easy  to 
vindicate  a  claim  for  other  names, 
mirrors  of  the  strong  movements 
or  strange  phantasies  of  their  age  — 
and  of  human  nature  in  all  ages  — 
Michelet,  Lamartine,  George  Sand, 
Balzac,  Taine. 


116  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

an        The    last    of    these    shining    names 

illustrative  ,       „     ,.  .  . 

digression,  prompts  a  word  or  digression  on  a  point 
in  what  I  have  already  said  on  the 
fortunes  of  books.  Taine  was  a  strenu- 
ous worker  and  high-hearted  man  if 
ever  man  was.  His  six  volumes  on  the 
French  Revolution,  its  antecedents,  and 
its  sequel,  are  admirably  attractive  as 
literature.  But  literary  splendour  did 
not  prevent  it  from  being  a  marked  case 
of  the  fluctuations  of  men's  verdicts  on  the 
causes  and  significance  of  events,  and  the 
authority  of  their  interpreters.  The  book 
has  enjoyed  immense  vogue  in  Europe.  It 
fell  in  with  the  reactionary  mood  that  fol- 
lowed the  overthrow  of  the  Second  Empire, 
and  that  desperate  catastrophe,  political 
and  moral,  the  Commune.  Its  claim  to  be 
history  has  been  almost  painfully  exposed 
by  the  more  authentic  writer  of  another 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  117 

school.  "The  document  does  not  speak 
to  Taine,"  says  his  critic ;  "  it  is  he  who  all 
the  time  is  speaking  to  the  document." 1 

Every  method  has  its  own  perils,  and 
the  perils  of  Taine's  method  are  plain. 
He  tells  us,  Whether  the  man  be  actor 
on  the  great  stage  of  our  world's  affairs, 
or  an  inspirer,  creator,  discoverer  in  the 
realms  of  knowledge,  truth,  and  beauty, 
character  and  work  flow  from  some 
master  faculty  within  him,  in  limits  set 
by  race,  by  surroundings,  by  the  hour. 
But  then,  alas,  such  unity  is  for  art,  and 
not  for  history.  As  an  achievement  of 
literary  ingenuity,  Taine's  hundred  pages 
upon  Napoleon  Bonaparte2  are  consum- 
mate. The  elements  are  skilfully  com- 

1  Taine,  Historien  de  la  Rev.  Franc.  Par  M.  Aulard,  p.  326. 
Faguet's  Questions  Politiques  (1903),  pp.  2,  19. 

2  Origines  de  la  France  Contemporaine,  Regime  Moderne, 
vol.  i.  chap.  i. 


118  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

pounded,  the  fusion  in  the  furnace  is 
perfect,  the  molten  stream  runs  truly  into 
all  the  channels  of  the  mould,  and  a 
form  of  superhuman  might  is  reared  upon 
its  pedestal.  This  is  not  the  way  in  which 
things  really  happen.  For  that  it  is  no 
wonder  that  the  critic  takes  down  a  volume 
of  Cardinal  de  Retz,  with  the  stir  and  spirit 
of  affairs  in  full  circulation,  and  the  actors, 
as  Retz  says,  "hot  and  smoking"  with 
violence  and  faction.  Or  he  might  take 
some  strong  pages  of  Clarendon,  Burnet, 
Bolingbroke,  Bacon,  Halifax,  Swift. 
Distri-  Let  us  repeat :  sovereign  gifts  of  brain 

national        an^  heart  have  not  been  so  unequally 
gifts.  distributed  over  the  western  world,  as 

fits  of  national  vanity  incline  men  to 
suppose.  One  of  the  drawbacks  to  the 
great  uprising  of  the  spirit  of  Nationality 
for  a  century  past,  has  been  —  I  by  no 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  119 

means  say  the  extinction,  but  —  the 
changed  hold,  of  the  cosmopolitan  sense 
of  human  relations  that  sounded  a  sil- 
ver trumpet  amid  all  the  international 
piracies  of  Silesia,  Poland,  and  the  rest. 
To  this  practical  declension  of  what  has 
been  called  allegiance  to  humanity,  or 
the  service  of  man,  or  over-ruling  altru- 
ism, one  at  any  rate  of  the  correctives 
is  the  thought  how  in  the  glories  of 
our  common  civilization,  each  nation  has 
its  own  particular  share,  how  marked  the 
debt  of  all  to  each.  How  disastrous 
would  have  been  the  gap  if  European 
history  had  missed  the  cosmopolitan 
radiation  of  ideas  from  France ;  or  the 
poetry,  art,  science  of  Italy ;  or  the 
science,  philosophy,  music  of  Germany ; 
or  the  grave  heroic  types,  the  humour, 
the  literary  force  of  Spain ;  the  creation 


120  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

of  grand  worlds  in  thought,  wisdom, 
knowledge,  —  the  poetic  beauty,  civil 
life,  humane  pity,  —  immortally  asso- 
ciated with  the  past  of  England  in  the 
western  world's  illuminated  scroll.  It 
is  not  one  tributary,  but  the  co-operation 
of  all,  that  has  fed  the  waters  and  guided 
the  currents  of  the  main  stream.  We 
may  ponder  some  national  trilogies  or 
quartettes.  Descartes,  Voltaire,  Mon- 
taigne :  Dante,  Michelangelo,  Galileo : 
Kant,  Goethe,  Beethoven :  Cervantes, 
Columbus,1  Las  Casas :  Hume,  Scott, 

1  Elaborate  attempts  are  made  to  show  that  the  discoverer 
of  America  was  no  Genoese,  but  a  Jew  from  Spanish  Galicia ; 
and  President  Grevy  even  did  so  unfriendly  an  act  as  to  grant 
a  decree  authorizing  a  statue  to  him  at  Calvi  in  Corsica.  Be  all 
this  as  it  may.  it  was  in  Spain  that  the  valiant  adventurer  pro- 
duced his  designs,  and  found  the  means  of  executing  them. 
Whether  born  at  Pontevechio  or  Genoa,  he  struck  such  root  in 
Spain  that  he  lost  the  Italian  tongue,  if  it  was  ever  his.  The 
controversies  are  exhaustively  handled  in  Revue  Critique, 
May  3,  1913. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  121 

Adam  Smith,  Burns :  Erasmus,  Grotius, 
Rembrandt :  Franklin,  Hamilton,  Wash- 
ington, Lincoln :  Shakespere,  Newton, 
Gibbon,  Darwin.  Choose,  vary,  amplify 
the  catalogue,  as  we  will  and  as  we  must, 
no  nation  nor  nationality  counts  alone 
or  paramount  among  the  forces  that  have 
shaped  the  world's  elect,  and  shared  in 
diffusing  central  light  and  warmth  among 
the  children  of  mankind.  To  deride 
patriotism  marks  impoverished  blood, 
but  to  extol  it  as  an  ideal  or  an  impulse 
above  truth  and  justice,  at  the  cost  of 
the  general  interests  of  humanity,  is  far 
worse.  Even  where  men  admit  as  much 
as  this,  it  is  wonderful  how  easily  a  little 
angry  shouting  makes  them  oblivious 
of  its  sanctity.  For  in  spite  of  fair 
words  and  noble  and  strenuous  endeavour 
for  peace  by  rulers,  statesmen,  and  most 


122 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 


of   those   who   have   the   public   ear   in 
Europe,  the  scale  of  armament  reveals 
the  unwelcome  fact  that  we  live  in  a 
military  age. 
TheEng-          Evolution,    for   reasons   easily   under- 

as  political    stood,  is  the  most  overworked  word  in  all 
vernacular, 


language  of  the  hour.  But  we  can- 
not  do  without  it,  and  those  are  right  who 
say  that  in  the  evolution  of  politics  noth- 
ing has  been  more  important  than  the 
successive  emergence  into  the  practical 
life  of  States  and  institutions,  of  such 
moral  entities  as  Justice,  Freedom,  Right. 
Of  these  glorious  and  sacred  aspira- 
tions in  substantial  form,  history  made 
the  English  tongue  their  vernacular. 
Whether  Burke  in  his  best  pieces,  or 
Aristotle  in  his  Politics,  shows  the  wider 
knowledge  of  human  nature,  learned  men 
do  not  decide.  At  least  the  philosopher 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  123 

of  small  city-states,  even  with  the  brain 
of  an  Aristotle,  could  not  be  expected  to 
have  any  idea  of  that  representative 
government  which  at  home  here  is  the 
governing  political  fact  of  to-day,  and  in 
other  lands  is  the  political  ideal.  It  was 
Locke  in  the  seventeenth  century  who  in 
connection  with  the  settlement  of  the 
monarchy  that  we  are  decorously  adjured 
to  call  a  revolution  and  not  a  rebellion, 
first  set  out,  as  has  been  said,  constitu- 
tional government  in  terms  of  thought, 
and  furnished  the  mainspring  of  political 
philosophy  for  long  ages  after.1  Fred- 
erick the  Great  says  that  his  illumination 
and  emancipation  came  from  Locke, 
though  we  cannot  be  sure  that  our  care- 
ful and  candid  sage  would  have  found  the 
career  of  his  Prussian  disciple  a  pattern 

1  Prof.  Sorley  in  Camb.  Hist,  of  Eng.  Lit.  viii. 


124  POLITICS  AND   HISTORY 

for  princes.  From  him  both  Montesquieu 
and  Rousseau,  the  famous  heads  of  two 
opposed  schools  and  rival  methods,  drew 
their  inspiration.  Countless  are  the 
governing  systems  all  over  the  globe  that 
have  found  their  model  here,  and  we 
may  record  with  no  ignoble  pride  that 
the  tongue  of  our  English  masters  of 
political  wisdom  is  spoken  by  160  millions, 
as  against  130  of  German,  100  of  Russian, 
70  of  French,1  and  50  of  Spanish.  Mark 
the  change  from  Bacon,  who  sent  his 

1  Here  is  the  estimate  of  a  competent  authority  as  to  the 
English-speaking  population  of  the  globe  —  over  forty-five 
millions  in  the  United  Kingdom;  about  twelve  millions  in 
Canada  and  Australia ;  at  least  five  millions  in  various  parts 
of  British  Africa;  in  India  1,672,000  literate  in  English,  and 
rather  less  than  half  a  million  whose  English  is  vernacular, 
and  it  is  the  official  language  of  the  annual  Congress;  say  a 
million  in  other  British  possessions.  If  we  take  into  account 
the  various  forms  of  pigeon  English  spoken  in  British  posses- 
sions and  elsewhere,  one  might  make  the  total  sixty-five 
millions.  Finally,  the  modest  addition  of  something  under 
100  millions  in  the  United  States. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  125 

Advancement  of  Learning  to  Prince 
Charles  in  a  new  Latin  dress,  because  a 
book  could  only  live  in  the  "general 
language,"  and  English  books  cannot  be 
"citizens  of  the  world."  Cromwell  as 
Protector  could  only  talk  to  ambassadors 
in  dog-Latin.  I  do  not  forget  that  among 
90  or  100  millions  of  our  triumphant 
figure,  the  King's  writ  does  not  run ; 
for  these  expanding  millions  live,  not 
under  our  bluff  Union  Jack,  but  under 
Stars  and  Stripes.  Still  less  can  we  for- 
get that  French  is  the  most  oecumenical 
of  all  living  tongues ;  so  sociable,  so 
exact,  so  refined,  copious,  and  subtle, 
in  its  diversity  of  shades  in  every  field, 
grave  and  gay ;  so  apt  alike  for  what  is 
trivial  and  frivolous,  and  for  high  affairs 
of  thought  or  business. 

The   only   parallel    to    the   boundless 


126  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

area  of  the  habitable  globe  conquered 
by  our  tongue,  is  held  by  some  to  be 
Arabic.  They  tell  us  that  though  Arabic 
in  Islamic  lands,  for  some  three  or  four 
centuries  became  the  medium  for  an 
active  propagation  of  ideas,  and  though 
by  the  Koran  it  retains  its  hold  in  its  own 
area,  and  keeps  in  its  literary  as  distinct 
from  its  spoken  form  the  stamp  of  thirteen 
centuries  ago,  yet  there  is  no  real  analogy 
or  comparison  with  the  diffusion  of  Eng- 
lish. Latin  is  a  better  analogy.  It  was 
spoken  pretty  early  in  the  towns  of 
Spain,  Gaul,  Britain,  and  somewhat  later 
in  the  provinces  on  the  Danube.  In  the 
East  it  spread  more  slowly,  but  by  the 
Antonines  and  onwards  the  use  of  Latin 
was  pretty  complete,  even  in  northern 
Africa.  Greek  was  common  through- 
out the  Empire  as  the  language  of  com- 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  127 

merce  in  the  fourth  century.  St.  Augus- 
tine says,  "Pains  were  taken  that  the 
Imperial  State  should  impose  not  only 
its  political  yoke,  but  its  own  tongue, 
upon  the  conquered  peoples,  per  pacem 
societatis."  This  is  what  is  slowly  com- 
ing to  pass  in  India.  Though  to-day 
only  a  handful,  a  million  or  so,  of  the 
population  use  our  language,  yet  English 
must  tend  to  spread  from  being  the 
official  tongue  to  be  a  general  unifying 
agent.  Any  Englishman  who  adds  to  the 
glory  of  our  language  and  letters,  will  de- 
serve Caesar's  grand  compliment  to  Cicero, 
declaring  it  a  better  claim  to  a  laurel 
crown  to  have  advanced  the  boundaries  of 
Roman  genius,  than  the  boundaries  of 
Roman  rule.  Whether  Caesar  was  sincere 
or  insincere,  it  is  a  noble  truth  for  us  as 
well  as  for  old  Rome. 


128 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 


Nationalist 
sentiment 
changed  to 
political 
idea. 


VI 

From  reflections  on  the  contributions 
of  great  nations  to  various  aspects  and 
phases  of  general  civilization,  it  is  no 
abrupt  transfer  of  thought  to  turn  to 
what  is  perhaps  the  most  marked  of  all 
the  agitations  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
the  political  movement  for  national 
autonomy.  In  the  sentiment  of  nation- 
ality there  is  nothing  new.  It  was  one 
of  the  main  keys  of  Luther's  Reforma- 
tion. What  is  new  is  the  transformation 
of  the  sentiment  into  a  political  idea. 
Old  history  and  fresh  politics  worked  a 
union  that  has  grown  into  an  urgent  and 
dominating  force.  Oppression,  intoler- 
able economic  disorder,  governmental 
failure,  senseless  wars,  senseless  ambi- 
tions, and  the  misery  that  was  their 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  129 

baleful  fruit,  quickened  the  instinct  of 
Nationality.  First  it  inflamed  vision- 
aries, then  it  grew  potent  with  the 
multitudes,  who  thought  the  foreigner 
the  author  of  their  wretchedness.  Thus 
Nationality  went  through  all  the  stages. 
From  instinct  it  became  idea ;  from  idea 
abstract  principle;  then  fervid  prepos- 
session ;  ending  where  it  is  to-day,  in 
dogma,  whether  accepted  or  evaded. 

A  man  who  wishes  to  trace  perplexities  Partition 

,  MI  P  11- 

to  their  source  will  not  forget  the  history 
of  the  claims,  ambitions,  and  pretensions 
of  Prussia,  Austria,  Russia,  when  they 
partitioned  Poland  140  years  ago.  Well 
did  Burke  in  1772  warn  Europe  that  Po- 
land was  only  a  breakfast  for  the  great 
armed  powers,  but  where  would  they 
dine?  "After  all  our  love  of  tranquil- 
lity," he  exclaimed,  "and  all  our 


130  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

expedients  to  preserve  it,  alas !  poor 
Peace !"  And  well  does  the  historian 
to-day1  declare,  in  a  poignant  sentence, 
the  partition  of  Poland  might  have  been 
a  statesmanlike  performance  if  it  could 
have  stopped  in  1772.  "But  history 
never  does  stop  short"  and  in  twenty 
years  Europe  found  itself  in  the  whirl- 
pool of  the  French  revolutionary  wars 
that  came  to  a  close  at  Waterloo.  I  have 
spoken  of  senseless  wars.  It  must  be 
confessed  that  the  passion  of  Nationality 
has  an  ample  share  in  most  of  them 
for  the  last  hundred  and  twenty  years, 
sometimes  as  cause,  sometimes  as  pretext. 
Advent  of  Among  the  glowing  spirits  who  have 
been  pillars  of  cloud  by  day  and  pillars 
of  fire  by  night  —  agents  in  transform- 
ing abstract  social  idealism  into  violent 

_l  Sorel,  La  Question  £  Orient  au  XVI II"  Siecle  (1878),  p.  306. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  131 

political  demand,  —  after  Rousseau  in 
date,  Mazzini  came.  What  the  first 
was  from  the  fall  of  the  Bastille  in  1789 
until  Napoleon's  rise  in  1800,  this  was 
Mazzini  in  the  era  after  Waterloo.  Each 
was  main  inspirer  of  the  commanding 
impulse  of  an  epoch,  each  the  fervid 
apostle  of  a  driving  principle.  We  need 
not  overlook  Fichte's  Addresses  to  Ger- 
many, or  the  splendid  utterances  of  all 
the  passion  and  all  the  reason  that  broke 
forth  in  the  ever-memorable  uprising 
against  Napoleon  in  1813.  Spain  had 
been  earlier  in  the  same  protest,  and  in  a 
struggle  no  less  victorious.  Poland  was 
destined  to  bear  the  banner  of  nationality 
for  desperate  generation  after  genera- 
tion, and  Hungary  shook  Western  Europe 
with  her  story.  But  the  Congress  of 
Vienna  achieved  a  European  settlement 


132  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

that  set  nationality  at  defiance,  and 
the  despots  whom  the  national  spirit 
had  enabled  to  overthrow  the  great 
French  captain,  instantly  took  in  hand 
the  extinction  of  all  the  light  and  sacred 
fire  of  that  very  spirit.  It  was  this 
systematized  defiance,  that  outraged  his 
whole  nature  in  Mazzini. 

Without  forgetting  the  splendid  eleva- 
tion of  Channing,  most  eloquent  of 
American  divines,  in  the  struggles  for 
human  freedom  in  northern  America, 
the  Italian  was  in  wider  range  than 
politics  the  most  fervid  moral  genius  of 
his  time.  No  other  man  of  his  century 
ever  united  intense  political  activity  with 
such  affluence  of  moral  thought  and 
social  feeling.  Prophets  have  a  right 
to  be  unreasonable,  and  in  many  a  page, 
as  in  acts  not  a  few,  Mazzini  goes  beyond 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  133 

unreason  into  the  flagrantly  irrational. 
Italian  genius  more  characteristically 
positive,  practical,  and  supple  than 
Mazzini's  was  needed  for  Italian  objects. 
Yet  it  was  fortunate  for  them  that  his 
rare  spirit  had  its  ascendancy.  He  was 
loud  and  over-loud  against  those  whom 
he  chose  to  deride  as  the  busy  race 
of  jugglers,  petty  Machiavels  of  the 
antechamber,  trading  politicians,  ready 
in  all  countries  to  swear  and  to  forswear, 
to  launch  out  boldly  or  creep  ashore 
according  to  the  wind.  It  is  not  such 
men  as  these  with  their  crooked  ways, 
court  intrigues,  and  false  doctrines  of 
expediency,  that  will  create  a  people. 
Do  not  think  that  men  of  that  sort  will 
ever  rise  to  such  a  spiritual  heat  for  the 
nation,  as  shall  carry  forward  a  cause 
like  this ;  as  will  meet  all  the  oppositions 


134  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

that  the  devil  and  wicked  men  can  make. 
"Machiavelli,"  he  cried,  "has  for  long 
ages  prevailed  over  Dante.  To  save 
Italy  and  awaken  the  soul  in  Europe, 
you  must  return  to  that  immortal  spring 
of  a  people's  noblest  aspirations."  With 
penetrating  eye  he  was  alive  to  the  saving 
truth  of  "Italy  a  Nation."  His  argu- 
The  Italian  ment  was  inexorable.  In  other  countries 

Prophet  and    .  .  .  . 

geometrical  impatience  of  inequality  and  sunering 
had  in  1848  driven  men  in  search  of  a 
new  order.  In  Italy  twenty -five  millions 
of  men  were  rising  for  an  idea ;  what  they 
sought  was  a  country.  When  they  had 
conquered  the  foreigner,  freedom  as  well 
as  independence  would  be  won.  No 
aim  but  the  creation  of  Italy,  and  Mazzini 
put  on  his  pamphlets  an  epigraph  from 
Euclid,  "The  right  line  is  the  shortest 
that  can  be  drawn  between  two  points." 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  135 

No  fallacy  has  ever  wrought  more  dis- 
astrous ravages.  Euclid  lived  a  good 
many  hundred  years  ago,  but  he  must  at 
any  rate  have  had  too  clear  a  head  not  to 
be  aware  that  geometry  is  not  politics. 
"The  papacy,"  again,  "now  no  more 
than  a  symbol  for  absolutist  government, 
must  be  dethroned.  While  the  idol 
stands,  its  shadow  will  cast  darkness 
around ;  priests,  Jesuits,  and  fanatics 
will  shelter  themselves  beneath  its  shade 
to  disturb  the  world ;  while  it  stands,  dis- 
cord will  exist  between  moral  and 
material  society,  between  right  and  fact, 
between  the  present  and  the  imminent 
future."  It  is  at  least  certain  that 
Mazzini's  teaching  was  not  merely  the 
most  direct  attempt  to  dethrone  the 
temporal  Pope  and  with  him  dogmatic 
and  secularized  Churches,  but  to  set  up 


136 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 


a  new  spiritual  gospel  in  their  place,  and 
to  light  up  human  life  and  public  duty 
with  new  meaning. 

Nationality  As  men  with  an  instinct  or  a  reasoned 
"volution-  feeung  f°r  emancipation,  even  now  turn 
ary  secret  over  Mazzini's  burning  pages,  in  spite 
of  pungent  reflections  that  cannot  be 
suppressed  on  what  would  have  come 
of  it  all  but  for  "political  jugglers"  like 
Cavour  and  Napoleon  III.,  and  the 
guilty  errors  of  expediency,  they  may  still 
find  the  passion  of  it  irresistible.  How 
much  more  can  we  imagine  the  flame  that 
it  kindled  in  the  breast  of  generations  to 
whom  the  hideous  dungeons  of  Naples, 
and  all  the  other  abominations  and  degra- 
dations of  foreign  rule  in  Italy,  were 
cruel  haunting  spectres  of  their  own  days. 
Nationality  became  the  deepest  and  most 
powerful  of  revolutionary  secrets.  Of 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  137 

the  Empire  and  the  Papacy,  the  two 
wielders  of  the  forces  of  cohesion  through 
the  middle  age,  it  is  truly  said  that  they 
were  neither  national  nor  international, 
but  supra-national.  On  their  decline, 
and  for  other  causes,  nationality  grew  to 
be  an  unsuspected  sequel.  Happily  for 
the  prophet,  the  time  brought  a  states- 
man. Four  Italians  played  high  parts  in 
modern  history,  and  Cavour,  endowed 
with  the  union  of  force  and  brains  that 
is  named  virtu,  is  called  as  supple  as 
Mazarin,  as  ingenious  as  Alberoni,  as 
intrepid  and  swift  as  Napoleon. 

Though  no  term  in  politics  is  of  more  what  is 
frequent  use  than  Nation,  it  is  not  easy 
to  define.  There  are  almost  as  many 
accounts  of  it,  as  we  have  found  in  other 
terms  of  the  political  dialect.  John 
Bright  was  thinking  of  kinder  and  hu- 


a 
Nation  ? 


138  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

maner  things  than  definition,  when  he 
spoke  his  famous  sentence  of  such  moving 
simplicity  —  the  polar  star  of  civilized 
statesmen  —  that  the  nation  in  every 
country  dwells  in  the  cottage.  What 
constitutes  a  nation ;  what  marks  it 
from  a  Nationality,  from  a  Society,  from 
a  State  ?  The  question  is  not  idle  or 
academic.  It  generates  active  heat  in 
senates  and  on  platforms,  for  example, 
at  this  moment,  whether  this  or  that 
portion  of  our  United  Kingdom  is  either 
nation  or  nationality.  When  the  idea 
was  mooted  of  France  seeking  compensa- 
tion after  the  Prussian  victory  at  Sadowa, 
important  men  denounced  it  as  "blas- 
phemy against  the  principle  of  national- 
ities." Let  us  theorize  for  a  moment. 
Here  is  what  the  dictionary  has  to  tell 
us  of  a  Nation  :  "An  extensive  aggregate 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  139 

of  persons,  so  closely  associated  with 
each  other  by  common  descent,  language, 
or  history,  as  to  form  a  distinct  race  or 
people,  usually  organized  as  a  separate 
political  state,  and  occupying  a  definite 
territory."  This  is  adequate  enough, 
and  consonant  with  usage.  But,  then, 
Belgium  is  a  political  State  and  yet  its 
Walloon  and  Flemish  provinces  are  not 
common  in  descent,  tongue,  or  history, 
and  their  dissidence  is  at  this  very  day 
something  of  an  active  issue.  Austro- 
Hungary  is  a  great  State,  though  they 
speak  twenty-four  languages  in  the  Aus- 
trian army.  Another  authority  finds 
in  usage,  —  quern  penes  arbitrium  est  et 
jus  et  norma  loquendi,  —  that  "wherever 
a  community  has  both  political  inde- 
pendence and  a  distinctive  character 
recognizable  in  its  members,  as  well  as 


140  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

in  the  whole  body,  we  call  it  a  nation." 
For  a  test  to  be  applied  all  over  the  world, 
this  is  perhaps  too  vague.  Freeman  lays 
it  down  in  his  own  imperative  way,  that 
the  question  what  language  they  speak, 
goes  further  than  any  other  one  question 
towards  giving  us  an  idea  of  what  we 
call  the  nationality  of  a  people.  We 
may  say,  again,  that  the  feeling  of 
nationality  is  due  to  identity  of  descent, 
common  language,  common  religion,  com- 
mon pride  in  past  incidents.  But  no 
single  element  in  the  list  makes  a  decisive 
test.  Language  will  not  answer  the  pur- 
pose; for  Switzerland  has  three  lan- 
guages, yet  is  one  nation.  In  South 
America  there  are  two  kindred  languages  ; 
mostly  common  descent,  common  pride 
in  their  wresting  of  independence  from 
Europe,  common  religious  faith.  Yet 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  141 

there  are  sixteen  communities  more  or 
less  entitled  to  the  rank  of  nations,  and 
the  traveller  tells  us  there  is  no  sense  of  a 
common  Spanish-American  nationality. 
Is  Nationality  to  be  decided  by  the  politi- 
cal character  of  territory,  or  by  the  people 
who  inhabit  it  ?  In  older  days  the  first 
was  the  prevailing  theory.  The  second 
prevails  to-day,  and  is  one  of  the  marks 
of  modern  system,  as  we  may  discern 
in  Balkan  perplexities.  Devotion  to  a 
dynasty  has  made  nations.  So  has  pas- 
sion for  a  creed.  So,  perhaps,  most  of 
all,  that  ingenita  erg  a  patriam  caritas, 
the  natural  fondness  for  the  land  where 
we  are  born. 

The  lineal  descent  of  national  stocks,  Ethnologic 
through  dim  ages  with  no  sure  or  intelli- 
gible chronicler,  offers  a  boundless  open- 
ing for  ethnologic  disputation.     Learned 


142  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

men  maintain,  for  instance,  and  men  no 
less  learned  deny,  that  the  Hellenic  race 
in  Europe  has  been  exterminated,  and 
that  the  modern  Greeks  are  a  mixture 
of  the  descendants  of  Roman  slaves  and 
Sclavonian  colonists.  Yet,  however  this 
may  be,  the  Greek  name  and  all  its 
glittering  associations,  over  the  whole 
field  of  politics,  ethics,  poetry,  and  art, 
seem  enough  to  inspire  nationality  in  its 
most  evident  sense.  The  absorption  by 
a  population  of  new  modifying  elements 
appears  an  obscure  and  mysterious  pro- 
cess. The  problem  is  at  this  day  pre- 
senting itself  on  a  truly  colossal  scale  in 
the  United  States,  where  the  old  floods  of 
immigration  from  Ireland  and  Germany 
are  now  replenished  by  swelling  hosts 
from  Southern  and  Central  Europe, 
Italians,  Hungarians,  Poles,  Russian 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  143 

Jews,  and  the  rest,  changing  both  racial 
and  religious  proportions,  while  the  negro 
contingent,  imported  in  the  old  slave- 
holding  days,  though  increasing  at  a 
slower  rate  than  the  white,  is  still  some 
10  or  11  per  cent  of  the  whole.  Yet  the 
political  nationality  of  the  United  States, 
their  high  and  strong  self-consciousness 
as  a  nation,  is  one  of  the  supreme  factors 
in  the  modern  world's  affairs. 

The  resistance  of  Spain  to  Napoleon  Spain  and 
from  1808  to  1813  has  been  called  the  Nap°le°n' 
greatest  European  event  since  the  French 
Revolution;    it   showed   Europe   that  a 
conqueror  may  shake  a  State  to  pieces, 
and  yet  the  nation  hold  together.     The 
machinery    of    the    Spanish    State    was 
violently  overthrown,  but  common  reli- 
gious passion,  the  inheritance  of  common 
language,    ferocious    common    pride    in 


144  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

triumphant  warfare  for  ten  long  centuries 
against  hated  faith  and  blood,  all  awoke 
and  maintained  in  full  blaze,  on  Napo- 
leon's uncalculating  provocation,  those 
intense  elements  of  national  vitality  in 
relation  to  which  the  organized  State  is 
but  secondary.  Tyrol,  Moscow,  Leipzig, 
are  names  for  immortal  chapters  in  the 
story  of  national  uprisings,  that  lent  their 
new  and  overwhelming  force  to  the 
soldiers  and  rulers  who  worked  the  politi- 
cal systems  of  the  hour.  It  has  been 
noted  as  one  of  the  curious  ironies  of 
history  that  it  was  the  victor  of  Marengo 
and  Austerlitz  who  first  since  the  Lom- 
bard kingdom,  a  thousand  years  before, 
established  unity  of  government  in  the 
Italian  peninsula,  and  laid  the  founda- 
tions of  modern  Italy. 
Sicily.  Sicily  has  found  a  dwelling-place  for 


POLITICS  AND   HISTORY  145 

many  nations,  but  as  the  most  learned  of 
our  historians  truly  assures  us,  a  Sicilian 
nation  there  has  never  been.  Europe, 
Asia,  Africa,  have  all  met  in  the  great 
central  island  of  the  Mediterranean. 
Greek,  Punic,  Roman,  Mussulman, 
Christian,  Saracen,  Arab,  Norman, 
Spaniard,  have  all  in  strange  turns  been 
ruling  and  subject  inhabitants.  Of  the 
unity  of  historical  antecedents,  supposed 
to  be  essential  to  a  nationality,  there  is 
little  trace  for  a  single  decade  of  Sicilian 
annals  until  1859.  Yet  Sicily  has  played 
a  part  of  its  own  in  the  records  of  Nation- 
ality, from  the  Sicilian  Vespers  in  the 
thirteenth  century  down  to  Garibaldi  and 
Crispi  in  the  nineteenth. 

Let  me  venture  on  a  parting  observa-  National 
tion  as  to  Nationality.     It  has  been  on 
the  whole  a  commanding  and  accepted 


146  POLITICS  AND   HISTORY 

impulse  for  our  era.  Yet  it  has  been 
contemporary  with  a  current  tendency 
of  equal  strength,  but  directly  opposite. 
One  chief  mark  of  the  same  time  has  been 
the  advance  of  Science  in  all  its  branches 
and  forms.  But  Science  works  not  at  all 
for  Nationality  or  its  spirit.  It  makes 
entirely  for  Cosmopolitanism.  In  multi- 
farious congresses  in  every  capital  of  the 
world  nationality  is  effaced.  Parthians, 
Medes,  Elamites,  meet  on  common  terms, 
and  liberty,  equality,  and  fraternity  all 
prevail,  without  intermixture  from  diplo- 
matic sophistries.  Science,  besides  all 
else  that  it  is  and  does,  is  the  strongest 
unifying  agent  of  the  time,  especially  if 
we  include  the  inventions  that  science 
makes  possible,  and  the  commerce  that 
inventions  stimulate  and  nourish.  Even 
those  who  are  least  disposed  to  share  the 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  147 

common  exultation  over  the  throng  of 
new  inventions  due  to  new  scientific 
knowledge,  may  perceive  that  the  respect 
for  scientific  rules  and  methods  which 
bring  these  fresh  conveniences  to  our 
doors,  tends  to  spread  itself  in  the  popular 
mind  through  the  whole  circle  of  men's 
opinion,  even  in  matters  of  daily  talk  and 
life  far  remote  from  the  atmosphere  of 
science.  This  respect  marks  the  general 
advent  and  common  diffusion  of  a  new 
intellectual  force  and  spirit. 

VII 

Another  question  that  I  can  here  do  progress  as 
little  more  than  note,  has  long  had  irre- 


sistible  interest  for  powerful  minds.     It  andfiied 

historic 

could  not  be  otherwise.     Is  the  track  all  law. 
upward  ?     That  is  not  all.     The  question 
strikes  far  deeper  than  merely  social  and 


148  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

political  interest.  It  goes  to  the  very 
quick  of  modern  interpretation  of  the 
working  of  past  history  and  our  present 
universe.  There  are,  we  may  suppose, 
three  explanations,  theories,  or  hypothe- 
ses of  the  course  of  human  things,  and 
the  power  that  guides  them,  shapes  them, 
and  controls  them.  One  assigns  this 
supreme  mysterious  control  to  Provi- 
dence ;  a  second  to  laws  of  Evolution ; 
a  third  to  a  beneficent  and  steadfast 
necessity,  in  which  we  confidently  trust 
under  the  name  of  Progress.  Such  is  the 
modern  aspect  of  an  eternal  riddle,  - 
far  too  momentous  for  us  to  confront 
here.  But  you  will  let  me  offer  one  or 
two  remarks  upon  the  divinity  of  Prog- 
ress, in  its  ordinary  mundane  accepta- 
tion. Progress,  like  Toleration,  or  Equal- 
ity, is  one  of  the  reigning  words  most 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  149 

familiar  in  common  use,  yet  having 
extremely  diverse  significance.  It  stands 
for  a  hundred  different  things.  Whether 
we  mean  advance  in  material  civiliza- 
tion during  historic  time ;  or  advance  in 
the  strength  and  wealth  of  human  nature ; 
or  advance  in  ideals  of  human  society  — 
and  these  are  evidently  neither  identical 
nor  always  contemporary  —  causes  are 
assumed  to  be  constantly  at  work,  tend- 
ing both  to  raise  the  high-water  mark  of 
civilization,  and  to  spread  its  various 
successive  gains  over  a  wider  level.  Do 
you  mean  progress  in  talents  and  strength 
of  mind  ?  Clear  thinkers  have  declared 
that  they  find  no  reason  to  expect  it,  and 
that  there  is  as  much  of  these,  and  often 
more,  in  an  ignorant  than  in  a  cultivated 
age.  But  there  is,  they  go  on  to  say, 
great  progress,  and  great  reason  to  expect 


150  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

progress,  in  feelings  and  opinions.1 
Close  examination  forces  us  to  be  con- 
tent with  something  far  short  of  this 
assumption.  A  universal  law,  for  all 
times,  all  States,  all  Societies,  Progress  is 
not.  There  is  no  more  interesting  prob- 
lem, for  instance,  in  the  region  of  modern 
historic  speculation,  than  the  decline  of 
the  Latin  race  in  the  southern  half  of  the 
American  hemisphere,  contrasted  with 
the  boundless  advance  both  in  material 
prosperity  and  mental  vigour  of  the  Eng- 
lish, Scotch,  Irish,  and  French  stocks 
among  their  northern  neighbours.  Prog- 
ress, says  one  grave  thinker,  not  over- 
stating a  plain  historic  truth,  "is  the  rare 
exception ;  races  may  remain  in  the 
lowest  barbarism,  or  their  development 
be  arrested  at  some  more  advanced 

1  Mill's  Letters,  ii.  359. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  151 

stage;  actual  decay  may  alternate  with 
progress,  and  even  true  progress  implies 
some  admixture  of  decay." l  An  extraor- 
dinarily copious  and  impressive  elabora- 
tion of  such  a  line  of  thought,  is  to  be 
found  in  a  work  of  twenty  years  ago,  on 
National  Life  and  Character,  of  which, 
whatever  we  may  decide  about  its  central 
thesis  as  a  forecast,  we  may  say  that  it 
opens,  collects,  expounds,  and  illustrates, 
vast  issues  in  the  evolution  of  States  and 
races,  better  worth  examining  and  think- 
ing about,  than  can  be  found  in  any  other 
book  of  the  same  period.2 

From  vast  tracts  and  periods  of  litera-  A  modem 
ture,  it  is  almost  startling  to  think  that 
the  idea  of  progress,  which  is  the  animat- 
ing  force   of   so   much   of   the   thought, 

1  Leslie  Stephen,  English  Thought  in  the  18th  Century,  i.  17. 

2  National  Life  and  Character :    a  Forecast,  by  Charles  H. 
Pearson,  1893. 


152  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

writing,  and  action  of  the  civilized  world 
to-day,  is  wholly  absent.  You  only  find 
glimpses  of  it  here  and  there  among 
Greeks  and  Romans.  Early  Christians 
could  care  little  for  a  world  which  they 
regarded  as  doomed  to  extinction  at  a 
near  date.  The  thought  of  retrogression 
is  constant.  Sages  and  poets  in  every 
age  have  warned  States  and  their  rulers 
of  the  inevitable  decay  that  awaits  them, 
as  it  awaits  each  mortal  man  himself. 
In  some  who  were  most  alive  to  the 
decline  in  standards  of  life  and  govern- 
ment, there  burned  a  fervid  hope  that 
somehow  declension  would  be  arrested, 
though  the  conditions  that  produced  it 
were  to  be  essentially  unaltered.  If  the 
past  had  been  all  wrong,  what  certainty 
of  the  same  agencies  that  had  governed 
the  past,  being  either  dispersed,  or  forced 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  153 

to  prepare  a  future  that  should  be  all 
right  ?  Bishop  Berkeley,  for  example, 
the  most  ardent  philanthropist  of  his 
day,  despaired  of  the  distempered  civiliza- 
tion of  his  country,  and  showed  in  prac- 
tice by  missionary  emigration  to  Rhode 
Island,  his  faith,  after  the  decay  of 
Europe,  in  a  golden  age  and  a  new  Fifth 
Empire  in  the  American  West  — 

The  seat  of  innocence, 

Where  Nature  guides  and  virtue  rules, 
Where  men  shall  not  impose  for  truth  and  sense, 

The  pedantry  of  courts  and  schools. 

He  did  not  realize  how  many  of  the 
pedantic  elements  would  inevitably  be 
transplanted,  and  how  many  of  the 
impediments  to  virtue,  truth,  and  sense 
would  survive  change  of  scene  and  clime. 
Even  for  ourselves,  authority  is  not  all 
one  way.  Angles  and  distances  make  all 


154  POLITICS  [AND  HISTORY 

the  difference  to  the  eagles  and  falcons 
Modem  who  survey  history.  We  know  more 
ments.  and  more  of  Nature  in  the  world  of 
matter;  we  have  more  power  over  its 
energies ;  men  have  increased  and  multi- 
plied and  spread  out  over  the  globe ; 
life  is  longer ;  vigour  and  endurance  have 
waxed,  not  waned.  International  law, 
though  important  chapters  are  still  to 
come,  has  made  much  way  since  Grotius 
wrote  one  of  the  cardinal  books  in  Eu- 
ropean history.  Forgive  me  for  mention- 
ing what  is  at  the  moment  a  word  of 
wrath.  The  curse  of  industrial  life  is 
insecurity.  The  principle  of  insurance 
applied  to  risks  of  every  kind  has  ex- 
tended and  ramified  in  a  truly  extraor- 
dinary way  during  the  last  fifty  years, 
until  it  is  now  one  of  the  subtlest  inter- 
national agencies,  uniting  distant  interests 


POLITICS  AND   HISTORY  155 

and  creating  perforce  a  thousand  mutual 
obligations.  A  portion  of  mankind  has 
access  to  higher  standards  of  comfort 
and  well-being.  For  a  thousand  years, 
Michelet  says,  Europe  was  unwashed. 
That  at  least  is  no  longer  absolutely  true. 
While  these  happy  forward  motions 
please  our  eye  and  thought,  they  demon- 
strate no  determined  law  of  social  history. 
Towering  States  have  vanished,  like 
shooting  stars.  Rome  is  not,  in  Byron's 
plangent  line,  the  only  lone  mother  of  dead 
empires.  The  desolation  of  history  at 
Paestum  or  Segesta,  at  Ephesus,  Olympia, 
Syracuse,  is  more  awful  than  the  sublime 
desolation  of  nature  in  tracts  of  Alpine  ice. 

You    remember    Gibbon's    declaration  compara- 
that  if  a  man  were  called  to  fix  the  period  perity  of  the 
in  the  history  of  the  world  during  which  ancient 

empire. 

the  condition   of   the   human   race   was 


156  POLITICS  AND, HISTORY 

most  happy  and  prosperous,  he  would 
without  hesitation  name  the  period 
between  the  death  of  Domitian  and  the 
accession  of  Commodus.  It  is  nearly  a 
century  and  a  half  since  Gibbon  wrote. 
The  trenchant  historian  of  Rome  of  our 
own  day  and  generation,  with  character- 
istic daring,  puts  and  answers  the  same 
question.  "If  an  angel  of  the  Lord," 
Mommsen  assures  us,  "  were  to  strike  the 
balance  whether  the  domain  ruled  by 
Severus  Antoninus  was  governed  with  the 
greater  intelligence  and  the  greater 
humanity  then  or  now,  whether  civiliza- 
tion and  general  prosperity  have  since 
then  advanced  or  retrograded,  it  is  very 
doubtful  whether  the  decision  would 
favour  the  present."  That  there  is 
another  side,  everybody  knows.  Slavery 
was  the  horrid  base.  Pagan  satirists  and 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  157 

Christian  apologists  alike  have  drawn 
dark  pictures  of  the  imperial  world.  From 
opposing  points,  exaggeration  of  its 
wickedness  was  their  common  cue.  Long 
after  the  old  stern  and  triumphant  Rome 
had  sunk,  after  the  storm  of  barbaric 
invasion  had  abated,  after  literature  had 
been  recovered,  take  an  ensuing  span  of 
Italian  history,  what  was  the  progress  ? 
Some  of  you  may  have  come  across  a 
vivid  picture  of  the  memorable  sixteenth 
century  in  Italy,  drawn  by  Taine  after 
reading  Benvenuto  Cellini,  Boccaccio, 
Machiavelli,  Vasari.  "This  Italian  soci- 
ety of  the  sixteenth  century,"  he  says, 
in  the  literary  undress  of  a  private  letter, 
"is  an  assemblage  of  ferocious  brutes 
with  passionate  imagination.  The  foot- 
men of  to-day  would  not  endure  the 
company  of  the  Duke  and  Duchess  of 


158  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

Ferrari,  of  Paul  III.,  Julius  II.,  Borgia, 
etc.  No  wit  nor  grace  nor  ease  nor 
amiability,  no  gentleness,  no  ideas,  no 
philosophy.  Pedantry,  gross  supersti- 
tion, risk  of  death  at  every  instant, 
the  necessity  of  fighting  at  every  street 
corner  for  life  or  purse,  harlotry  and 
worse  than  harlotry  —  all  with  a  crudity 
and  a  brutality  beyond  belief."  And 
learned  modern  inquirers,  competent  in 
wide  range  of  knowledge,  insist  that, 
difficult  as  it  must  be  to  gauge  the  aver- 
age morality  of  any  age,  "it  is  question- 
able whether  the  average  morality  of 
civilized  ages  has  largely  varied."  Evi- 
dence enough  remains  that  there  was  in 
ancient  Rome,  as  in  London  or  Manches- 
ter to-day,  "a  preponderating  mass  of 
those  who  loved  their  children  and  their 
homes,  who  were  good  neighbours  and 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  159 

faithful  friends,  who  conscientiously  dis- 
charged their  civil  duties."1  Even  the 
Eastern  Roman  Empire,  that  not  many 
years  ago  was  usually  dismissed  with 
sharp  contempt,  is  now  recovered  to 
history,  and  many  centuries  in  its 
fluctuating  phases  are  shown  to  have 
been  epochs  of  an  established  State,  with 
well-devised  laws  well  administered,  with 
commerce  prosperously  managed,  and 
social  order  conveniently  worked  and 
maintained. 

Mill  puzzled  us  many  years  ago  (1857)  Reproofs  to 
by   what   seemed   an   audacious   doubt.  supersti- 
"  Hitherto   it  is  questionable,"   he  said,  tion* 
"if   all    the   mechanical    inventions   yet 
made  have  lightened  the  day's  toil  of 
any  human  being.     They  have  enabled  a 

1  Hatch,   Influence  of  Greek  Ideas  and   Usages  upon  the 
Christian  Church,  p.  138. 


160  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

greater  population  to  live  the  same  life  of 
drudgery  and  imprisonment,  and  an  in- 
creased number  to  make  fortunes.  But 
they  have  not  yet  begun  to  effect  those 
great  changes  in  human  destiny,  which 
it  is  in  their  nature  and  in  their  futurity 
to  accomplish." 1  This  doubt,  when 
quickened  into  fervid  activity  of  mixed 
pity  and  anger,  by  its  clash  with  new 
ideals  of  the  human  lot,  has  bred  a  fresh 
Socialism,  the  immense  perplexity  of 
ruling  men  to-day.  Whether  Socialism 
can  be  the  assured  key  to  progress,  is 
still  a  secret.  Meanwhile,  it  is  unjust 
to  history  to  overlook  the  strenuous 
efforts  that  have  softened  the  hardships 
incident  to  spread  of  mechanical  inven- 
tion. The  "drudgery  and  imprison- 
ment" is  not  what  it  was.  Child  labour 

1  Polit.  Econ.  ii.  326. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  161 

has  been  abolished.  The  labour  of 
women  is  guarded.  The  hours  of  men  are 
reduced.  I  need  not  tell  over  again  all 
that  beneficent  tale ;  it  saved  the  nation. 
Its  full  effects  are  still  uncounted.  Mill 
was  not  afraid  of  an  economically 
"stationary  state,"  but  then  he  appended 
the  emphatic  proviso  that  the  question  of 
population  should  always  be  held  in  due 
regard.  He  did  not  live  to  see  a  Europe 
where  the  military  rivalry  of  divided 
nations  has  for  the  moment  violently 
shifted  that  vital  question  into  unex- 
pected bearings,  because  ratio  of  popu- 
lation is  one  of  the  main  elements  in  all 
computations  of  fighting  strength.  It 
is  the  recruiting  sergeant  now  holds  the 
international  scales. 

The    decrepitude    that   ended    in    the 
Latin  conquest  of  Constantinople  at  the 

M 


162  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

beginning  of  the  thirteenth  century,  and 
the  Mahometan  conquest  in  the  middle 
of  the  fifteenth,  is  an  awkward  reproof 
to  the  optimist  superstition  that  civilized 
communities  are  universally  bound 
somehow  or  another  to  be  progressive. 
Whether  that  decrepitude  was  due  to 
Byzantine  incompetence  for  working 
government  on  the  vast  imperial  scale, 
or  to  the  misuse  of  intellectual  energy  in 
futile  and  exasperating  polemics,  or  to  the 
gross  and  crushing  subjection  of  spiritual 
power  to  temporal,  --  these  are  questions 
of  the  first  interest  to  all  who  seek  philo- 
sophic history.  They  are  neighbours, 
too,  to  a  wider  question  that  has  no  little 
actuality  to-day.  For  some  observers, 
who  know  and  have  thought  much  about 
it,  pronounce  it  not  clear  that  Western 
isiam.  contact  with  Eastern  races  will  increase 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  163 

the  sum  of  human  happiness.  And  what 
of  evolution  among  Eastern  races  them- 
selves ?  From  time  to  time  attempts  are 
made  by  reforming  Moslems  to  discover 
a  basis  for  "liberalism"  in  the  Koran 
itself.  Only  a  few  years  ago,  for  example, 
was  published  an  address  from  Moslems 
in  Tunis  to  a  French  official,  earnestly 
assuring  him  by  an  ingenious  assortment 
of  texts  that  there  was  nothing  in  the 
Koran  incompatible  in  spirit,  if  not 
exactly  in  letter,  with  the  immortal 
"principles  of  '89."  Thence  they  argue 
that  just  as  Christianity  has  passed 
through  slavery,  intolerance,  and  degrad- 
ing incidents  connected  with  the  seclusion 
of  women,  so  the  religion  of  Mahomet 
may,  like  Christianity,  make  its  way  into 
a  higher  and  purer  air.  That  Islamism  is 
a  marked  advance  for  backward  races  is 


164  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

generally  admitted,  and  that  it  is  not 
incompatible  with  solid  intelligence  and 
all  manly  virtues  we  know.  We  hardly 
find  instances  to-day  on  any  marked  scale 
of  its  capacity  to  adapt  itself  to  all  the 
modern  requirements  of  a  civilized  State. 
Some  observers,  however,  hold  a  more 
sanguine  view.  Whether  nationality  is 
likely  to  take  the  bond  of  religion  in 
Moslem  countries,  is  another  question  not 
easy  to  answer.  There  may  be  a  tendency 
in  that  direction,  and  it  may  be  stimulated 
by  the  decline  of  Turkish  power.1 

After  all,  it  is  well  to  measure  against 
the  procession  of  changes  that  have 
swept  through  culture,  civilization,  and 
the  modern  world,  some  stupendous 
fixities  of  human  things.  If  we  think, 

1  On  these  points,  see  Lord  Cromer's  Modern  Egypt,  i.  136- 
140 ;  Bryce's  Studies  in  History  and  Jurisprudence,  ii.,  Essay  13. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  165 

for  example,  of  all  that  Language  means ; 
of  the  unplumbed  depths  of  mortal 
thought,  mood,  aim,  appetite,  right,  duty, 
kindness,  savagery ;  and  yet  how  stable 
language  is,  and  how  immutably  the 
tongues  of  leading  stocks  in  the  world 
seem  to  have  struck  their  roots.  Then 
consider  the  three  great  faiths  —  Chris- 
tendom, Judaism,  Islam  —  in  spite  of 
endless  reformation,  counter-reformation, 
internecine  conflict  within,  displacements 
by  fire  and  sword  from  without.  Yet  if 
we  survey  the  far-stretching  cosmorama  of 
religions  in  their  vast  history,  how  stead- 
fastly the  name,  the  rites,  the  practices, 
and  traditions,  and  intense  attachment  to 
them  all,  persist  even  after  reasoning  and 
comparative  methods  seem  to  have  plucked 
up  or  worn  away  the  dogmatic  roots. 
On  one  thing,  at  any  rate,  optimist  and 


166  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

Progress',     pessimist  agree,   that  progress  is  no  au- 

no  automa- 
ton, tomaton,  spontaneous  and  self-propelling. 

It  depends  on  the  play  of  forces  within 
the  community  and  external  to  it.  It 
depends  on  the  room  left  by  the  State 
for  the  enterprise,  energy,  and  initiative 
of  the  individual.  It  depends  on  the 
absence  from  the  general  mind  at  a 
given  time,  of  the  sombre  feeling,  Quota 
pars  omnium  sumus,  how  small  a  fraction 
is  a  man's  share  in  the  huge  universe  of 
unfathomable  things.  It  depends  on  no 
single  element  in  social  being,  but  on  the 
confluence  of  many  tributaries  in  a  great 
tidal  stream  of  history ;  and  those  tides, 
like  the  ocean  itself,  ebbing  and  flowing 
in  obedience  to  the  motions  of  an  incon- 
stant moon.  Though  Greek  is  not  com- 
pulsory with  you  here,  we  may  go  back 
for  the  last  poetic  word  on  all  this,  to  the 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  167 

ode  in  the  Greek  play  where  the  chorus 
recounts  with  glorious  enumeration  how 
of  all  the  many  wonders  of  the  world, 
the  most  wondrous  is  Man ;  he  makes  a 
path  across  the  white  sea,  works  the  land, 
captures  or  tames  animals  and  birds  for  his 
daily  use ;  he  has  devised  language  and  from 
language  thought,  and  all  the  moods  that 
mould  a  State ;  he  finds  a  help  against  every 
evil  of  his  lot,  save  only  death ;  against 
death  and  the  grave  he  has  no  power.  No 
progress,  at  any  rate,  in  harmony  of  words 
or  strength  of  imagination  in  the  four-and- 
twenty  centuries  since  Sophocles,  dims  the 
force  and  beauty  of  these  ancient  lines.1 

VIII 

The  Italian  Machiavel  of  the  fifteenth  "The  state 
century    is    applauded    by    a    German 

1  Antigone,  332-64.    Jebb,  p.  76. 


168  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

Machiavel  of  the  nineteenth,  for  disclos- 
ing and  impressing  the  mighty  funda- 
mental that  "the  State  is  Force."  We  call 
Treitschke  and  Machiavelli  by  a  com- 
mon name  without  offence,  because  both 
writers  have  the  signal  courage  and  rare 
merit  to  proclaim  what  each  of  them 
takes  for  rigid  and  relentless  truth. 
Rulers,  they  say,  may  be  shy  of  owning 
that  the  State  is  Force,  and  the  more 
respectable  or  the  weaker  among  them 
do  their  best  to  find  a  decent  veil.  Still 
things  are  what  they  are,  and  the  politic 
augur  does  not  deceive  himself.  Politi- 
cal right  and  wrong  depends  on  the 
practice  of  your  age,  and  on  what  is  done 
by  other  people.  Machiavelli  did  not  go 
beyond  common  sense  when  he  "saw  no 
reason  for  fighting  with  foils  against  men 
who  fight  with  poniards." 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  169 

We  all  know,  to  be  sure,  that  in  one  in  what 
vital  sense  the  State  is  Force.  Yet  as  a 
bare  primordial  law  of  social  existence, 
experience  shows  how  easily  it  falls 
into  frightfully  misleading  disproportion. 
Carlyle  brought  it  to  a  startling  point, 
when  he  declared  that  after  all  the  funda- 
mental question  between  any  two  human 
beings  is,  "Can  I  kill  thee,  or  canst  thou 
kill  me  ?  "  But  is  the  main  truth  actually 
this,  that  brutality,  whether  naked  or  in 
uniform  and  peruke,  is  the  fundamental 
postulate  between  rulers  and  ruled,  or 
between  governments  and  nations  on  the 
two  sides  of  a  frontier  ?  The  judge,  the 
constable,  the  sheriff,  as  we  know  well 
enough,  are  indispensable  against  foes 
within,  and  the  soldier  with  his  rifle  for 
foes  across  the  frontier.  Still  the  prin- 
ciple is  no  beacon-fire,  until  we  have 


170  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

vigilantly  explored  it.  What  sort  of 
State,  what  sort  of  Force  ?  What  is  to 
be  the  place  of  the  Minister  of  Police  in 
internal  government  ?  Is  there  to  be  a 
jury  of  twelve  honest  men  in  a  box,  and 
a  writ  of  habeas  corpus,  and  no  privilege 
conceded  to  an  official  of  the  State  against 
the  civil  rights  of  ordinary  citizens  ? 
The  formula  of  force  would  not  have  been 
rejected,  so  far  as  it  goes,  by  William  the 
Silent,  Cromwell,  Turgot,  Washington, 
Lincoln,  or  any  other  of  the  small  host 
who  pass  for  mankind's  political  de- 
liverers. It  would  have  been  silently 
accepted,  if  they  had  stooped  to  theorize, 
by  the  most  barbarous  tyrants  in  modern 
history,  from  Ezzelino  in  the  thirteenth 
century,  down  to  King  Bomba  in  the 
nineteenth.  There  is  no  more  revolting 
chapter  in  the  annals  of  Christendom  than 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  171 

the  Spanish  Inquisition.  Yet  it  was  in 
fact  a  definite  branch  of  the  State,  and  at 
an  auto-da-fe  any  Familiar  with  a  con- 
science might  have  murmured,  as  he 
heaped  the  faggots  round  his  firm-souled 
victim,  that  after  all  the  State  is  Force. 
So,  too,  the  Jacobin  with  his  guillotine. 
Manifold  are  the  types  of  State  and  the 
conditions  of  the  Force,  —  by  whom,  for 
instance,  and  on  what  terms  it  is  wielded. 
The  maxim  does  not  harden  into  a  doc- 
trine fit  for  use,  until  in  a  given  case  we 
know  of  the  force,  what  are  its  instru- 
ments and  origins,  the  nature  of  its 
energies.  What  is  the  power  of  its 
action  for  social  stability  on  the  one 
hand,  and  social  motion,  whether  forward 
or  backward,  on  the  other  ?  How  stands 
it  towards  opinion  and  law,  the  two 
great  agencies  of  government  ?  Above 


172  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

all,  let  us  know  what  price  it  costs,  when 
the  full  and  final  balance  has  been  struck. 
Cavour  for  Cavour,  to  whom  a  foremost  place  is  not 
cannon.  denied  by  any  of  the  writers  of  this 
school  of  Force,  used  to  talk  of  "people 
like  me  who  have  more  faith  in  ideas 
than  in  cannon  for  mending  the  lot  of 
humanity."1  Yet  not  Stein  nor  any  of 
the  builders  of  Germany  had  less  patience 
with  the  abstractions  of  Metapolitics,  — 
the  counterpart  in  theories  on  govern- 
ment, to  Metaphysics  in  speculation  upon 
Being,  —  than  had  the  first  effective 
builder  of  Italy.  The  ideas  in  which  he 
had  faith,  were  ideas  with  practical  aims 
tested  by  open  discussion.  With  un- 
criticized  bureaucracy  called  to  no  ac- 
count by  those  over  whom  it  is  set,  he 
had  as  little  sympathy  as  with  meta- 

1  Scritti,  ii.  225. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  173 

politics.  Bureaucracy  has  not  to  per- 
suade, to  compromise,  to  give  and  take, 
to  prove  and  win  its  case  in  the  course  of 
free  personal  debate  in  face  of  rival 
ideas  and  antagonistic  interests.  Relieved 
from  these  wholesome  exigencies,  it  may 
carry  and  enforce  measures  efficiently, 
but  with  too  little  security  that  time  will 
prove  them  right.  And  who  that  has 
watched  bureaucracy  at  close  quarters, 
will  deny  that  it  is  in  fact  more  cumbrous, 
dilatory,  and  depressing  for  a  people's 
political  energy  —  and  not  any  less  so  to 
those  who  work  it  —  than  that  discussion 
in  a  representative  assembly,  which  is 
the  salutary  substitute.  Such  a  system 
Cavour  from  his  heart  distrusted.  He 
was  the  man  of  parliaments,  constitutional 
minister,  murmuring  on  his  death-bed 
against  absolute  power  and  state  of  siege. 


174  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

Bismarck          Bismarck  was  a  giant  of  the  older  well- 
known  type,   working  through  imposed 

\^£mossftt 

authority  and  armed  force.  Before  he 
made  war,  first  on  Austria,  next  on 
France,  he  declared  war  upon  his  parlia- 
ment. "I  recognize  no  authority  save 
that  of  his  Majesty  the  King,  I  oppose 
all  attacks  aimed  at  the  sovereignty  of 
the  monarch,  like  bronze  or  granite." 
That  the  maxim  of  the  State  being 
Force  does  not  carry  us  magisterially 
through  the  more  subtle  and  delicate 
branches  of  national  business,  this  power- 
ful man  was  rapidly  to  learn  from  his 
rude  encounter  with  the  Church  from 
1875  to  1878.  The  famous  Culturkampf, 
or  fight  for  modern  civilization,  for 
obvious  reasons  is  no  favourite  topic  in 
Germany,  but  it  is  one  of  the  most 
striking  episodes  in  the  deepest  conflict 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  175 

of  our  time.  The  motives  of  its  author 
are  obscure,  —  whether,  like  France  and 
Belgium,  he  meant  it  for  a  counter  to  the 
Vatican  Council ;  or  a  stroke  against  the 
Poles  and  Catholic  particularismus  in 
southern  Germany ;  or  a  searching  test  of 
imperial  unity ;  or  an  iron-handed  sequel 
to  Luther  and  Germanism  against  the 
Tiara  beyond  the  mountains.  Be  this  as 
it  may,  after  a  grand  parliamentary 
drama  the  repulse  was  severe.  "To 
Canossa,"  he  said,  recalling  the  mighty 
struggle  between  the  Emperor  and 
Hildebrand,  "I  will  not  go  either  in  flesh 
or  spirit."  Yet  in  five  years  to  Canossa 
Bismarck  figuratively  went,  though  with- 
out the  three  penitential  days  under 
falling  snows  in  the  Canossa  courtyard, 
where  a  German  prince  eight  hundred 
years  before  had  bent  before  an  ecclesias- 


176  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

tic  as  daring,  immovable,  and  potent  as 
Prince  Bismarck  himself.  To  find  that 
miscalculated  provocation  has  ended  in 
reducing  your  bills  to  a  dead  letter ;  and 
rallying  a  strong  and  permanent  parlia- 
mentary force,  was  an  enduring  humilia- 
tion that  held  a  lesson. 

influence  in  Though  the  Middle  Age  is  over,  though 
Authority.  no  Hildebrand  nor  Innocent  can  now 
survive,  yet  Influence  retains  a  share  of 
the  power  so  long  upheld  by  the  bolder 
pretensions  of  Authority.  Well  may  the 
Roman  Church  be  described  as  the  most 
wonderful  structure  that  "the  powers  of 
human  mind  and  soul,  and  all  the 
elemental  forces  at  mankind's  disposal 
have  yet  reared"  (Acton).  Here  we 
meet  a  branch  of  politics  that  only  too 
plainly  deserves  attention  from  those  who 
care  in  the  fullest  sense  to  comprehend 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  177 

the  problems  of  their  time.  History  has 
brought  the  relation  of  spiritual  power 
and  temporal  into  many  aspects  and 
bearings  all  over  Europe.  It  touches 
vivid  controversies  on  schools,  religious 
congregations,  endowments,  churches, 
"exalting  their  mitred  front  in  court  and 
parliament,"  and  is  not  likely  soon  to 
disappear.  It  is  not  for  me  here  to  do 
more  than  glance  at  it.  I  will  not  linger 
on  Erastus,  the  Heidelberg  doctor  of  ill- 
omened  name,  who  in  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury propounded  (or  did  not  propound) 
the  doctrine  of  the  supremacy  of  the 
civil  magistrate  in  things  ecclesiastical, 
that  raises  many  violent  disputations  in 
relation  to  English  and  Scotch  establish- 
ment.1 The  Erastian  principle  has  been 

1  See  The  Thesis  of  Erastus  touching  Excommunication,  by 
Rev.  Robert  Lee,  Edinburgh,  1844. 


178  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

greatly  transformed  in  the  United  King- 
dom in  the  last  sixty  years,  and  further 
transformations  await  it.  The  internal 
temper  and  spirit  of  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land has  undergone  immense  changes 
within  the  same  period,  and  to  what 
extent  these  internal  changes  have  altered 
the  value  set  upon  secular  privilege, 
either  by  her  members  or  in  external 
opinion,  remains  an  active  issue. 

However  that  may  stand,  the  Roman 
Church,  for  good  or  for  evil,  has  in  itself 
qualities  of  a  State  that  do  not  belong 
even  to  the  most  vigorous  and  exclusive 
of  Protestant  communions.  A  famous 
French  writer,  a  Piedmontese  statesman 
of  the  Napoleonic  age,  wrote  a  book  in 
1817  upon  the  Pope,  defining  and  vin- 
dicating the  papal  sovereignty,  in  the 
same  temper  and  on  the  same  lines  as  the 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  179 

Machiavellian  school  in  the  area  of 
State.  De  Maistre  has  been  styled  one  Spiritual 
of  the  Vatican's  praetorian  guard.  In  organized 
his  dogmatic  fixity,  his  poor  opinion  of  state- 
mankind,  his  hatred  of  all  individual 
claim,  his  readiness  to  shape  an  argument 
in  anger,  that  tells  and  hits  the  mark 
without  wounding  —  this  most  brilliant 
of  all  theocrats  recalls  many  a  chapter  of 
the  indomitable  Treitschke.  If  there 
were  time,  an  illuminating  comparison 
might  be  worked  out  between  them.1 
Like  some  of  the  greatest  pontiffs  whose 
power  he  exalted,  he  was  that  compound 
of  the  profound  mystic  with  man  of  the 
world,  which  often  causes  us  so  much  sur- 
prise —  unreasonable  and  unconsidered, 
for  few  compounds  are  more  common 

1  A  piece  upon  De  Maistre  is  to  be  found  in  my  Critical 
Miscellanies  (ed.  of  1886),  vol.  ii. 


180  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

even  in  a  rationalistic  age.  I  only  name 
De  Maistre,  because  it  is  always  an 
advantage  to  have  theories  systematically 
set  out ;  and  his  initial  proposition  that 
infallibility  in  the  spiritual  order,  and 
sovereignty  in  the  temporal  order  are 
pure  synonyms,  is  a  useful  warning  to 
those  who  suppose  that  the  principle  of 
the  State  being  Force  is  a  conclusive, 
satisfying,  comprehensive  formula,  finally 
summing  up  the  case  of  civilized  govern- 
ment. His  argument  is  simple.  Any 
organized  society  demands  a  govern- 
ment. On  various  grounds,  in  the 
organized  Catholicism  of  Rome,  that 
government  must  be  a  monarchy,  and 
being  infallible  it  must  be  absolute  over 
all  such  as  choose  to  remain  its  subjects, 
—  subjects  called  by  the  kinder  name  of 
children.  In  imposing  such  force  as  he 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  181 

commands  upon  remonstrants,  the  pon- 
tiff will  be  careful  to  avoid  collision 
with  domestic  laws  of  temporal  sovereigns, 
just  as  Prince  Bismarck  found  out  that 
they  will  be  wise  to  avoid  collision  with 
him.  Treitschke's  doctrine  provoked 
plenty  of  antagonism  in  the  temporal 
world,  and  the  corresponding  way  of 
dealing  with  spiritual  sovereignty  has 
not  been  approved  by  all  who  find  repose 
or  shelter  within  the  Roman  fold.  Noth- 
ing, say  eminent  men  among  them,  can 
be  more  remote  from  the  political  notions 
of  monarchy  than  pontifical  authority. 
That  authority  is  not  the  will  of  the 
rulers,  but  the  law  of  the  Church,  binding 
those  who  have  to  administer  it  as 
strictly  as  those  who  have  to  obey. 
Arbitrary  power  is  made  impossible  by 
that  prodigious  system  of  canon  law, 


182  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

which  is  the  ripe  fruit  of  the  experience 
and  inspiration  of  eighteen  hundred 
years.1  So  be  it.  Yet  the  attempt  by 
theocratic  partisans,  from  the  majestic 
Bossuet  down  to  the  meagre  Pobedon- 
ostzeff  in  our  own  day,  to  insist  upon  a 
difference,  whether  the  government  be 
legitimate  or  revolutionary,  Prince,  Pope, 
or  Demos,  between  absolute  and  arbitrary, 
tested  by  demands  of  practice  is  little 
more  than  sophistry.  You  will  be  glad 
to  escape  to  safer  and  more  secular 
ground,  but  these  topics  are  by  no 
means  out  of  date,  and  they  deserve  the 
interest  of  intelligent  readers  of  the 
newspapers. 

cienchersof  "How  vague  and  cloudy,"  we  are  told 
by  g°°d  readers,  "were  many  of  the 
German  treatises  of  the  last  60  years  on 

1  Acton,  History  of  Freedom  and  other  Essays,  1907,  p.  192. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  183 

the  theory  of  the  State."  Even  those 
who  insist  most  strongly  that  the 
abstract  paves  the  way  for  the  concrete, 
that  the  transcendental  is  the  only  secure 
basis  for  order  by  government,  and  that 
evolution  of  the  Absolute  is  the  right 
precursor  of  Sadowa  and  Sedan,  cannot 
but  admit  that  in  Germany  at  least  it 
was  the  dynasty  of  historians,  and  not 
the  abstract  men,  who  supplied  the  final 
clenchers  for  public  opinion  and  national 
resolution.  Treitschke,  the  most  bril- 
liant of  the  dynasty,  one  day  fell  upon 
a  volume  of  the  letters  of  Cavour. 
Admiring  Cavour's  clearness  of  mind, 
cheerful  simplicity,  common  sense  and 
measure,  he  goes  on:  "Nothing  for  a 
long  time  has  chained  my  attention  so 
fast.  This  intensely  practical  genius  is 
of  course  different  by  a  whole  heaven's- 


184  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

breadth  from  the  great  poets  and  thinkers 
that  are  so  trusted  by  us  Germans. 
Yet  he  stands  in  his  own  way  before  the 
riddles  of  the  world  as  great  as  Goethe  or 
Kant."  After  Sadowa  Treitschke  pro- 
nounced any  dragoon  who  struck  down  a 
Croat  to  have  done  more  at  that  moment 
for  the  German  cause,  than  the  subtlest 
political  head  with  the  best  cut  quill. 
To  such  lengths  do  brilliant  men  push 
things  in  their  humour  for  Real-Politik 
and  hurrying  to  be  quit  of  the  abstract. 
With  this  writer,  reaction  went  far.1 
In  an  iron  age,  he  urges,  —  and  our  age 
is  iron,  —  to  make  peace  your  steadfast 
aim,  is  not  only  a  dream,  but  a  blind 
resistance  to  the  supreme  law  of  life  that 
the  strong  must  overcome  the  weak. 
It  is  a  futile  attempt  to  evade  stern  facts, 

1  Politik:  Vorlesungen,  2  vols.  (1899). 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  185 

it  nurses  selfishness,  intrigue,  material 
greed,  coarse  egotism.  War  is  the  great- 
est school  of  duty,  and  to  preach  against 
it  is  not  only  foolish,  but  immoral. 
Frederick  the  Great  is  right,  that  war 
opens  the  most  fruitful  field  for  all  the 
virtues ;  for  steadfastness,  compassion, 
for  the  lofty  soul,  the  noble  heart,  for 
charity ;  every  moment  in  war  is  an 
opportunity  for  one  or  other  of  these 
virtues.  Even  duelling  is  manly  dis- 
cipline in  courage,  self-respect,  and  the 
principle  of  honour. 

These  sanguinary  sophistries  find  re- 
sounding echoes.  One  recent  writer  of 
the  school  inscribes  for  motto  on  his 
title-page  —  "War  and  brave  spirit  have 
done  more  great  things  than  love  of  your 
neighbour.  Not  your  sympathies,  but 
your  stout-hearted  prowess,  is  what  saves 


186  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

the  unfortunate." *  All  this  glorification 
of  war,  although  shining  poets  of  our 
own  lent  to  it  the  genius  of  their  music 
not  so  many  years  ago,  is  surely  as  dis- 
astrous an  outcome  for  the  school  that 
presents  it,  as  was  Machiavelli's  choice 
of  Caesar  Borgia  to  be  the  grand  example 
of  his  Prince. 

Let  us  refresh  ourselves  by  recalling 
the  plea  for  perpetual  peace  that  came 
from  the  pen  of  the  great  German,  who 
died  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  leaving  behind  him  a  fame  and 
influence    both    as    metaphysician    and 
moralist,  that  place  him  among  the  fore- 
Kant's         most  of  all  his  countrymen.     Outside  of 
landing       philosophy,    he    owed    much    to    Bayle, 
peace.          Rousseau,     St.     Pierre,     above     all     to 
Montesquieu.       But  he  watched  the  two 

1  Bernhardi,  Deutschland  und  der  ndchste  Krieg. 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  187 

great  affairs  of  his  time,  the  revolt  of 
the  American  Colonies,  and  the  over- 
throw of  the  French  monarchy,  with  an 
interest  hardly  less  keen  than  that  of 
Burke  himself,  with  whose  later  views  he 
warmly  sympathized.  Though  supreme 
in  the  region  of  the  abstract,  he  had 
mind  left  for  man  as  a  political  creature 
in  the  concrete.  His  tracts  on  Cosmo- 
political  History,  inspired  from  French 
sources,  in  their  own  day  missed  fire,  nor 
is  his  setting  of  good  ideas  attractive  in 
its  form.  It  is  too  dogmatic,  abstract, 
geometric.  That  notwithstanding,  the 
principles  of  common  sense  applied  to  his 
ideal  of  permanent  peace  in  a  European 
federation,  are  stated  with  admirable 
effect.  He  points  to  the  immoderate 
exhaustion  of  incessant  and  long  prepara- 
tion for  war.  He  presses  the  evil  conse- 


188  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

quence  at  last  entailed  by  war,  even 
through  the  midst  of  peace,  driving 
nations  to  all  manner  of  costly  expedients 
and  experiments.  When  war  ends,  after 
infinite  devastation,  ruin,  and  universal 
exhaustion  of  energy,  comes  a  peace  on 
terms  that  plain  reason  would  have  sug- 
gested from  the  first.  The  remedy  is  a 
federal  league  of  nations  in  which  even 
the  weakest  member  looks  for  protection 
to  the  united  power,  and  the  adjudication 
of  the  collective  will.  States,  Kant  pre- 
dicts, must  of  necessity  be  driven  at  last 
to  the  very  same  resolution  to  which  the 
savage  man  of  nature  was  driven  with 
equal  reluctance;  namely  to  sacrifice 
brutish  liberty,  and  to  seek  peace  and 
security  in  a  civil  constitution  founded 
upon  law.  This  civil  constitution  must 
in  each  State  be  republican,  —  a  point 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  189 

that  may  have  alienated  opinion  in 
monarchical  Germany,  but  in  fact  it 
was  not  meant  to  go  beyond  some  one  or 
more  of  the  many  possible  shapes  of 
representative  government.  As  it  has 
unfortunately  happened,  neither  republic 
nor  parliament  has  yet  found  itself  able 
to  walk  in  Kant's  way,  but  he  marks  a 
bright  patch  in  dubious  skies. 

IX 

Statesmen  are  supposed  not  to  take  a  The  two 

•  .  PI*          i»  Schools. 

high  view  or  their  tellow-creatures. 
Mazzini  says  of  the  historian  of  the  Coun- 
cil of  Trent,  "Like  most  statesmen, 
Sarpi  had  no  great  faith  in  human  nature." 
Too  narrow  a  reading  of  famous  Italians 
of  the  age  before  Sarpi,  like  Machiavel 
and  Guicciardini,  gives  them  a  worse 
reputation  in  this  respect  than  they 


190  POLITICS  AND   HISTORY 

deserve.  In  England,  save  in  bad  periods, 
our  most  politic  princes  and  rulers, 
though  circumspect  and  shrewd,  have 
been  no  cynics.  They  took  human 
nature  with  wise  leniency,  though  George 
III.,  himself  a  consummate  politician  in 
the  worst  sense,  declared  politics  a  trade 
for  a  rascal,  not  for  a  gentleman.  "How 
goes  our  education  business?"  Frederick 
the  Great  asked  of  an  official.  "Very 
well,"  was  the  answer;  "in  old  days, 
when  the  notion  was  that  men  were 
naturally  inclined  to  evil,  severity  pre- 
vailed in  schools,  but  now  when  we 
realize  that  the  inclination  of  men  is 
good,  schoolmasters  are  more  generous." 
"Alas,  my  dear  Sulzer,"  was  Frederick's 
reply,  "you  don't  know  that  damned 
race  as  I  do."  Even  those  who  would 
with  truth  deny  that  they  looked  on 


POLITICS  AND   HISTORY  191 

great  politics  as  no  more  than  a  game  of 
skill,  do  not  flatter  their  human  material. 
Tocqueville,  for  instance,  was  philos- 

on  the 

opher,  member  of  parliament,  and  for-  political 

•  ,  TT*  •  man. 

eign  secretary.  His  experience  was 
ample;  he  saw  public  business  and  its 
agents  at  first  hand.  His  autobiographic 
pages  are  liberally  strewn  with  allusions 
to  the  volatility  of  men,  and  to  the  empti- 
ness of  the  great  words  with  which  they 
cover  up  their  petty  passions.  Nations 
are  like  men,  he  said ;  they  prefer  what 
flatters  their  passions  to  what  serves 
their  interests.  "I  do  not  despise  the 
mediocre,  but  I  keep  out  of  their  way,  I 
treat  them  like  commonplaces  :  I  honour 
commonplaces,  for  they  lead  the  world, 
but  they  weary  me  profoundly."  Of 
Napoleon  III.:  "It  was  his  flightiness, 
rather  than  his  reason,  that,  thanks  to 


192  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

circumstance,  made  his  success  and  his 
power ;  for  the  world  is  a  curious  theatre, 
and  there  are  occasions  where  the  worst 
pieces  succeed  best."  "I  found  that  it  is 
with  the  vanity  of  men  you  do  most 
good  business,  for  you  often  gain  very 
substantial  things  from  their  vanity, 
while  giving  little  substance  back.  You 
will  not  do  half  so  well  with  their  ambi- 
tion or  their  cupidity.  But  then  it  is 
true  that  to  make  the  best  of  the  vanity  of 
other  people,  you  must  take  care  to  lay 
aside  all  your  own." 

Tocqueville,  however,  we  must  remem- 
ber, though  in  his  earlier  day  he  was  the 
approving  critic  and  skilful  analyst  of 
certain  forms  of  democracy,  was  well 
described  as  an  aristocrat  who  accepted 
his  defeat.  And  far  less  conscientious, 
careful,  and  well -trained  thinkers  than 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  193 

he,  can  with  very  little  trouble  lay  their 
hands  on  weaknesses  of  human  nature, 
and  therefore  of  democratic  systems, 
since  they  depend  for  their  success  on 
human  nature's  strength.  As  if  autoc- 
racy, which  had  twice  ruined  the  French 
State  in  his  own  lifetime,  was  free  from 
the  duperies  that  democracy,  still  less 
either  landed  or  plutocrat  oligarchy,  is 
not  able  wholly  to  escape.  In  any 
system,  is  not  what  Burke  said  the  real 
truth?  "The  true  lawgiver  ought  to  Maxim  for 
have  a  heart  full  of  sensibility.  He  ought 
to  love  and  respect  mankind,  and  to 
fear  himself.  .  .  .  Political  arrange- 
ment, as  it  is  a  work  for  social  ends,  is 
only  to  be  wrought  by  social  means. 
Mind  must  combine  with  mind.  Time 
is  required  to  produce  that  union  of 
minds  which  alone  can  produce  all  the 


194  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

good  we  aim  at."  This  was  in  keeping 
with  the  same  great  man's  dictum,  that 
in  any  large  public  connection  of  men 
love  of  virtue  and  detestation  of  vice 
always  prevail.  To  the  general  truth  so 
broadly  stated,  history  may  demand 
some  qualification,  but  the  manful  proc- 
lamation that  the  true  lawgiver  ought 
to  love  and  respect  mankind  and  fear 
himself,  sets  a  cardinal  mark  of  division 
between  two  schools  of  modern  govern- 
ment. Men  like  Rousseau,  Fichte, 
Mazzini,  Burke,  whose  eloquence  has 
wielded  supreme  influence  in  the  politi- 
cal sphere  within  the  last  150  years ; 
or  the  men  like  Byron,  Shelley,  Burns, 
and  the  poets  of  freedom  in  continental 
Europe,  had  not  much  in  common  with 
the  sword-bearer  of  English  Puritanism, 
though  what  they  had  in  common  was 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  195 

the  root  of  the  matter.  Cromwell  set 
the  case  in  famous  words:  "What 
liberty  and  prosperity  depend  upon  are 
the  souls  of  men  and  the  spirits  —  which 
are  the  men.  The  mind  is  the  man." 
Yes,  and  the  historic  epochs  that  men  are 
most  eager  to  keep  in  living  and  inspiring 
memory,  are  the  epochs  where  the  mind 
that  is  the  man  approved  itself  uncon- 
querable by  force. 

What  a  withering  mistake  it  is  if  we  «The  Mind 

i    •      •     j    i  P  j  -.is  the  Man." 

let  indolence  ot  mood  tempt  us  into 
regarding  all  ecclesiastical  or  theological 
dispute  as  barren  wrangles,  all  political 
dispute  as  egotistic  intrigues.  Even  the 
common  shades  and  subdivisions  of  party 
-  Right,  Left,  Right  Centre,  Left  Centre 
and  the  rest  —  are  more  than  jargon  of 
political  faction.  They  have  their  roots, 
sometimes  deep,  sometimes  very  shallow, 


196  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

in  varying  sorts  of  character.  In  forms 
hard  and  narrow,  still  if  we  have  candour 
and  patience  to  dig  deep  enough,  they 
mark  broad  eternal  elements  in  human 
nature;  sides  taken  in  the  standing 
quarrels  of  the  world ;  persistent  types 
of  sympathy,  passion,  faith,  and  princi- 
ple, that  constitute  the  fascination,  in- 
struction, and  power  of  command  in 
history. 

Everybody  who  knows  anything  knows 
that  it  is  waste  of  our  short  lives  to  insist 
on  ideal  perfection.  Popular  govern- 
ment, or  any  other  for  that  matter,  is  no 
chronometer,  with  delicate  apparatus 
of  springs,  wheels,  balances,  and  escape- 
ments. It  is  a  rough  heavy  bulk  of 
machinery,  that  we  must  get  to  work  as 
we  best  can.  It  goes  by  rude  force  and 
weight  of  needs,  greedy  interests  and 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  197 

stubborn  prejudice;  it  cannot  be  ad- 
justed in  an  instant,  or  it  may  be  a  gener- 
ation, to  spin  and  weave  new  material 
into  a  well-finished  cloth.  There  is  a 
virtuous  and  not  uninfluential  school, 
and  Mill  leaned  in  their  direction,  who 
think  that  there  exists  in  every  com- 
munity a  grand  reserve  of  wise,  thought- 
ful, unselfish,  long-sighted  men  and 
women,  who,  if  you  could  only  devise 
electoral  machinery  ingenious  enough,  if 
they  had  only  parliamentary  chance  and 
power  enough,  would  save  the  State. 
That  such  a  reserve  should  exist,  should 
acquire  and  exert  its  influence,  should 
spread  the  light,  is  felicity  indeed. 
More  than  felicity,  it  is  an  essential. 
It  must  be  the  main  text  of  every  exhor- 
tation to  a  university.  But  this  is  not 
to  say  that  the  State  will  be  fortified  in  its 


198  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

tasks  by  special  electoral  artifices,  with  a 
scent  of  algebra  and  decimals  about  them. 
These  are  not  easily  intelligible  either  in 
principle  or  working  to  plain  men ;  they 
are  more  likely  to  irritate  than  to  appease, 
to  throw  grit  instead  of  oil  among  the 
huge  rolling  shafts  and  grinding  wheels  of 
public  government. 

ironies  in  Some  of  the  most  effective  actors  in  the 
world's  theatre  have  been,  it  is  true,  most 
sensible  of  everlasting  ironies  in  the 
drama.  :'The  most  malicious  demo- 
crat," Bismarck  said,  "can  have  no  idea 
what  nullity  and  charlatanry  are  con- 
cealed in  diplomacy."  It  has  somewhere 
been  called  the  art  of  passing  bad  money. 
The  three  contracting  parties  to  the  Holy 
Alliance  —  the  sinister  confederacy  that 
almost  makes  one  regret  Napoleon  - 
attempted  three  or  four  months  after 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  199 

Waterloo  to  bind  one  another  to  make  the 
precepts  of  the  Christian  religion,  as  set 
forth  in  Holy  Scripture,  the  sole  guide 
of  their  public  conduct,  with  what  edify- 
ing results  Europe  was  soon  to  learn. 
In  the  tortuous  negotiations  among  the 
representatives  of  the  Powers  before  the 
battle  of  Leipzig,  it  was  once  proposed 
deliberately  to  insert  a  false  citation. 
The  British  representative  was  Lord 
Aberdeen.  He  electrified  his  colleagues 
by  declaring  that  as  a  man  of  honour  he 
would  never  sign  a  lie.  English  diploma- 
tists have  not  seldom  found  themselves  in 
difficulties  from  the  simple,  direct,  blunt 
turn  of  our  average  British  mind.  They 
are  disposed,  as  it  has  been  put,  to  take 
words  at  their  face  value,  while  foreign 
ministers  and  publicists  of  subtler  mould 
and  susceptibility,  are  apt  to  read  inter- 


200  POLITICS  AND  HISTORY 

pretations  into  our  plain  words  that 
in  negotiation  prove  a  stumbling-block 
and  an  offence. 

Bismarck  was  fond  of  an  iron  ring  from 
St.  Petersburg,  with  a  favourite  Russian 
word  inscribed  upon  it,  nitchevo,  —  like 
the  corresponding  Irish  word  that  pleased 
Sir  Walter  Scott,  nabochlish,  —  "What 
does  it  matter  ? "  His  table-talk,  like 
Luther's,  or  Lincoln's,  or  Cavour's,  was 
coloured  by  a  satiric  humour  that  it 
would  be  foolish  to  count  for  cynicism, 
scepticism,  pessimism,  or  any  other  of 
that  ill-omened  family.  It  was  only  one 
of  the  cheerful  tricks  of  fortitude.  Such 
moods  have  nothing  in  common  with 
Leopardi's  poetic  gloom  over  the  hypoc- 
risies of  destiny ;  or  the  dare-devil  wit  of 
Don  Juan;  or  the  mockeries  of  Heine; 
least  of  all  with  Swift,  —  a  born  politi- 


POLITICS  AND  HISTORY  201 

cian,  if  ever  there  was  one,  but  one  who 
had  no  political  chance,  and  avenged 
himself  by  letting  irony  blacken  into 
savage  and  impious  misanthropy.  With- 
out making  the  mistake  of  measuring  the 
stature  of  rulers  and  leaders  of  men  by 
the  magnitude  of  transactions  in  which 
they  found  themselves  engaged,  none  at 
least  of  those  who  bear  foremost  names  in 
the  history  of  nations,  ever  worked  and 
lived,  we  may  be  sure,  in  the  idea  that 
it  was  no  better  than  solemn  comedy 
for  which  a  sovereign  demiurgus  in  the 
stars  had  cast  their  parts. 


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Secretary  of  the  Interior,  Philippine  Insular  Government,  1901-1913 
Vuthor  of  "  The  Philippine  Islands  and  Their  People,"  etc. 


The  Hon.  DEAN  C    WORCESTER'S  New  Book 

THE  PHILIPPINES 

BY  DEAN  C.  WORCESTER 

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There  is  no  greater  authority  on  these  insular  possessions  than  Mr.  Worcester 
who,  as  early  as  1887,  and  again  in  1890  was  a  prominent  member  of  scientific  ex- 
peditions to  the  Islands;  from  1899  to  1901  was  a  member  of  the  U.  S.  Philippine 
Commission;  since  1901  has  been  Secretary  of  the  Interior  to  the  Insular  Govern- 
ment, and  who  in  1899  published  "  The  Philippine  Islands  and  Their  People,"  a 
record  of  personal  observation  and  experience,  with  a  short  summary  of  the  more 
important  facts  in  the  history  of  the  archipelago,  which  has  ever  since  been  the  ac- 
knowledged standard  work  of  information  concerning  the  Islands. 

In  Mr.  Worcester's  valuable  new  work,  past  and  present  conditions  are  minutely 
reviewed  with  regard  for  strict  accuracy  of  statement.  The  author's  position  giving 
him  free  access  to  all  the  government  records,  much  of  the  information  thus  made 
available  has  never  been  before  made  public.  With  practically  unlimited  material 
on  which  to  draw  in  the  way  of  illustrations,  very  fine  and  rare  photographs  inti- 
mately related  with  the  text  emphasize  the  lessons  which  they  are  respectively  in- 
tended to  teach. 

The  result  is  a  work  of  the  greatest  importance  as  well  as  of  the  greatest  interest 
to  all  concerned  as  to  the  future  possibilities  of  the  Philippines  and  as  to  the  course 
the  United  States  Government  should  pursue  in  the  interest  of  the  several  peoples 
of  the  Islands. 

CONTENTS 

Chapter  I.  — View  Point  and  Subject  Matter.  Chapter  II.  —  Was  Independence  Prom- 
ised? Chapter  III.  —  Insurgent  "  Cooperation."  Chapter  IV.  —  The  Premeditated  Insur- 
fent  Attack.  Chapter  V.  —  Insurgent  Rule  and  the  Wilcox-Sargent  Report.  Chapter  VI.  — 
nsurgent  Rule  in  the  Cagayan  Valley.  Chapter  VII.  —  Insurgent  Rule  in  the  Visayas  and 
Elsewhere.  Chapter  VIII.  — Did  We  Destroy  a  Republic?  Chapter  IX. —  The  First 
Philippine  Commission.  Chapter  X.  —  The  Conduct  of  the  War.  Chapter  XI.  —  The 
Second  Philippine  Commission.  Chapter  XII. — The  Establishment  of  Civil  Government. 
Chapter  XIII.  —  The  Philippine  Constabulary  and  Public  Order.  Chapter  XIV.  -  American 
Governors.  Chapter  XV.  —  Health  Conditions.  Chapter  XVI.  —  Baguio  and  the  Benguet 
Road.  Chapter  XVII.  —  Coordination  of  Scientific  Work  Chapter  XVIII.  —  Improved 
Means  of  Communication.  Chapter  XIX.  —  Education.  Chapter  XX. — The  Administra- 
tion of  Justice.  Chapter  XXI.  —  Financial  Reform.  Chapter  XXII.  — The  Philippine 
Forests.  Chapter  XXIII.  —  Philippine  Lands.  Chapter  XXIV.  —  Peace  and  Prosperity. 
Chapter  XXV.  —  Commercial  Possibilities  of  the  Philippines.  Chapter  XXVI.-  The 
Picturesque  Philippines.  Chapter  XXVII.  — Fish  and  Game.  Chapter  XXVIII.-  The 
Exploration  of  Non-Christian  Territory.  Chapter  XXIX.  —  The  Government  of  Non- 
Christian  Tribes.  Chapter  XXX.  —  The  Government  of  Non-Christian  Tribes  (continued). 
Chapter  XXXI.  — Corrigenda.  Chapter  XXXII.  — Non-Christian  Tribe  Problems.  Chap- 
ter XXXIII.  —  Slavery  in  the  Philippine  Islands.  Chapter  XXXIV.  — The  Philippine 
Assembly.  Chapter  XXXV.  —  1$  Independence  Possible  ?  Chapter  XXXVI.  —  The  Future 
of  the  Philippines. 

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THE  LIFE  OF  COLONEL  ROOSEVELT 


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book  is  the  personal,  official  statement  of  Rooseveltism  as  a  political  creed  and  gospel.  It  is 
Mr.  Roosevelt's  own  account  of  his  own  proceedings,  accompanied  by  his  own  commentaries. 
It  does  not  explain.  It  does  not  excuse.  It  declares  justification.  Not  to  every  man  who 
has  retired  from  the  highest  office  in  the  land  has  the  opportunity  come  while  he  was  still  in 
his  living  prime  to  confront  his  critics  and  strengthen  the  faith  of  his  friends."  —  New  York 
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life  "  —  New  York  Sun. 

"  Mr.  Roosevelt's  experience  of  life  has  educated  him.  ...  As  here  revealed,  it  is  a  sig- 
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